Personal information gathered from price comparison Web sites might have been used without people’s knowledge or consent by pro-Brexit campaigners in the European referendum.
An ex-director of Cambridge Analytica told parliament last week that she believed the Leave.EU campaign, headed by then-UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader and European Parliament lawmaker Nigel Farage and bankrolled by Arron Banks, might have breached data protection laws by using people’s private information without consent.
She said she had seen with her “own eyes” how Leave.EU had apparently targeted customers of Eldon Insurance — owned by Banks — using their private data to promote anti-Europe messaging.
Banks, Leave.EU and Eldon have vehemently denied having shared any such data, either with each other or with Cambridge Analytica.
However, a “subject access request” submitted to Eldon has revealed that it holds data not just on its own customers, but also on people who have submitted a query to a price comparison Web site (PCW), which involves them agreeing to the site’s privacy terms.
A subject access request is a legal mechanism for individuals to obtain information from companies about what personal information the company holds about them, why it is held and how it is used. Such a request has revealed that personal details from a car insurance query to the PCW Moneysupermarket were passed to Eldon and held in its database. The data included name, date of birth, address, e-mail address, details of friends and family and telephone number.
In its last annual report, Moneysupermarket said that it held data on 24.9 million people — or about half the British electorate.
Moneysupermarket did not respond to the Observer’s questions about whether, and if so to what extent, it had passed on any of its customers’ personal data to Eldon.
Potential customers who use most price comparison Web sites enter multiple pieces of sensitive personal information into an inquiry form that is then passed to partner companies.
The privacy terms of the PCWs make clear that such data sharing might occur. However, the fact that this happens raises the prospect that people who simply searched for insurance online via a PCW could have had their private information shared in a way they might not have realized.
Ravi Naik, a human rights lawyer who specializes in data rights, said it would be “an astonishing misuse” of data.
“It’s absolutely huge,” he said. “In theory, commercial operators could have access to almost every voter in the UK. People should be very concerned. This would absolutely be in breach of the second principle of data protection — that data gathered for one purpose isn’t used for another purpose.”
A former Cambridge Analytica director, Brittany Kaiser last week gave evidence to the select committee of the British Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) that Banks asked Cambridge Analytica to combine data from different sources in order to profile and then target voters in the European referendum: “He asked us to design a strategy where we could work with Leave.EU, UKIP and Eldon Insurance data together.”
She also submitted documents that showed “complementary work streams” for UKIP, Leave.EU and Eldon insurance.
“We were asked whether savings could be achieved by running these three programs together, instead of separately,” she said.
Banks owns Eldon, the umbrella group for various insurance brands that includes the GoSkippy brand and underwrites Debenhams insurance. The Leave.EU campaign was based inside its headquarters in Bristol.
Leave.EU said that Kaiser’s testimony was “a confused litany of lies and allegations,” while lawyers for Banks and Eldon said such allegations were “highly defamatory,” that none were true, and that there was no evidence to support them.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion