It's easy for candidates to know nearly everything about you, from whether you own your house to what kind of car you drive. Voter profiles start with public sources like voter records, which contain party affiliation and who voted in past elections. Campaigns also collect addresses, professional licensing and business information and other freely available data they can match with voters' names.
Maybe you're one of those people who don't mind seeing political ads. "Targeted ads are harmless," says Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler, which provides Internet security services to companies. On the other hand, "they're a nuisance, because you're getting bombarded with things." Chaudhry worries more about the potential for abusing voter profiles -- especially profiles that include Facebook data -- to discriminate against opponents or engage in "social engineering."
A recent EPIC study on smartphones, privacy and the 2012 election, which Coney co-authored, speculates that operatives unaffiliated with any campaign could send inexperienced voters deceptive messages, giving them wrong or misleading information about voting hours or identification requirements as a way to suppress voter turnout. However, Coney says, "I can't imagine a candidate or campaign that would want to do this."
Meanwhile, laws designed to help individuals prevent marketers from targeting them, such as the federal Do Not Call list, don't apply to political campaigns, says Coney. And employees aren't necessarily protected if their views run counter to those of their employers. In 2004, an Alabama woman who worked for a Bush supporter was fired because she refused to remove a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker from her car, and in March, a Wisconsin janitor lost her job when she declined to remove a sign from her car supporting Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
"There are no rules" for protecting voter privacy at the federal level, Coney says, though some states have voter privacy laws. It's up to the campaigns to police themselves -- and listen to voters who don't want to be targeted.
Licensing agreements with data providers may include rules for how information they provide is used. For example, in 2008, consumer data the Obama campaign obtained from InfoUSA could only be read by computers, says Dan Langer, president of Data Farm Consulting, who was the campaign's national data director. The data would be matched with voter records in order to generate a targeting "score" that told strategists how to approach particular voters. But campaign workers wouldn't know which of hundreds of data elements generated the result. "It's not like anyone can look up an individual consumer and search one person at a time," he says.
Operatives unaffiliated with any campaign could send inexperienced voters deceptive messages, giving them wrong or misleading information about voting hours or identification requirements as a way to suppress voter turnout.
Nor, says Simon, "could you say I want a list of all the Prius owners in Michigan and send them something about the environment." Anyone who was allowed to have access to the database had to sign a document agreeing to abide by the rules, says Langer. "These are professionals who are working with the data. They want to continue working in this business and they take it very seriously."
Voters who don't want to be targeted need to take matters into their own hands, by telling campaigns not to bother them. "Campaigns don't want to call you if you don't want to be called," says Coney. "You can [follow] their Twitter feed and talk about how they're annoying you to death."
If it's important to you to shield information about your views, the best advice is to think about what you say in public -- including online and in social media -- and to understand what information is collected via smartphone apps. Meanwhile, use your own devices, so you don't run afoul of company policies by logging time on corporate devices for personal use.
Being able to better control our privacy "is a reasonable thing to ask for," says Chaudhry. "Consumers have to come forward with a common front."
Illustration by Bob Al-Greene Photo courtesy Flickr, JD Hancock.