Australian political parties are using voter e-mail addresses to find matching social media profiles then combining them with the country’s compulsory electoral roll data, illustrating how privacy scandals have done little to slow the march of data-driven campaigning.
While the use of data and public profiles from Facebook, Twitter and other social media for political campaigning has become widespread globally, Australia is one of the most open countries in the world to online information gathering by political operatives.
“Most Australians have little idea about how many data points organizations like political parties, let alone Facebook, have on each of them,” said Glenn Kefford, a political scientist at Macquarie University who has written extensively about data-driven campaigning. “They would be shocked and probably disgusted.”
Australia, which goes to the polls on May 18, is one of the few Western democracies where voting is compulsory.
What is more, Australian political parties and candidates are exempt from privacy laws covering access to the electoral roll data — full names and addresses — that all 16 million voters are required to provide.
Last year, Europe introduced sweeping laws requiring political organizations to get specific permission before scraping a person’s data from another Web site.
However, the Australian government rejected calls for a review of its exemption from privacy laws.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said it has been asking the government for over a decade to overturn that exemption, and “continues to hold the view that this exemption should be re-examined in light of the changing digital environment and data collection practices.”
Branches of the left-leaning Labor and Greens parties, the conservative Liberals and the rural-focused Nationals have all hired consultants to run the US-owned campaigning software NationBuilder, a Reuters analysis of party Web sites showed.
Privately held NationBuilder, which counted several senior Facebook personnel among its early investors and markets itself as politically neutral, launched its social media “match” function in 2013, but stopped automatically offering it in Europe last year due to new digital privacy laws.
Australian Attorney General Christian Porter said in an e-mail that the exemption was “designed to encourage freedom of political communication and support the operation of the electoral and political process.”
When the Labor Party posted on Facebook a video of two of its leaders bantering on a campaign bus last month, artist Jaymie Faber was one of 1,600 people who clicked “like,” automatically sending the party’s NationBuilder database her name and Facebook photograph.
From there, the party could manually enter her public profile information, which included her employment situation and home city, to match with electoral roll information.
“While I never intended for the information to be collected into a database, I also accept that I had the knowledge that it could be a possibility,” Faber told reporters. “I don’t believe that it should be allowed or legal to be collected in such a matter, but unfortunately it is.”
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