WASHINGTON - Shortly before Election Day, a Stanford graduate
student reported that the campaign websites of both President Barack
Obama and Republican Mitt Romney were "leaking" personal information
about their supporters through careless data handling.
Had it been Facebook and Google, a federal investigation might
have ensued, and the companies could have suffered significant
public relations setbacks and perhaps fines. But the Federal Trade
Commission, the government agency most focused on personal privacy,
has no jurisdiction over campaigns or political groups.
That is a small example of what privacy advocates say is a big
problem with efforts to protect personal information in the United
States: The politicians are not guarding the chicken coop. They are
the foxes.
Obama's sophisticated use of Big Data gave him a crucial edge in
what, based on popular support alone, should have been a close
election. Republicans are desperate to catch up. But it's not clear
who is positioned to protect the rights of voters at a time when
politicians from both parties increasingly build their campaigns on
the insights that commercial data brokers provide.
Washington has a community of professional privacy advocates at
places such as the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center
and the Center for Digital Democracy. Jeff Chester, executive
director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said he approached
both presidential campaigns to express his concerns long before the
election. But he got nowhere.
"Maybe we're digital Don Quixotes," Chester said. "There was a
lack of interest, not surprisingly."
People routinely tell pollsters that they're concerned about
online privacy, and Chester and his colleagues in the field count
some allies on Capitol Hill and in the White House. The FTC under
Chairman Jon Leibowitz and David Vladeck, head of its Bureau of
Consumer Protection, have made the agency far more aggressive on
consumer privacy generally - even if political campaigns are beyond
their reach.
Yet overall the laws in the United States are much less strict
than in Europe, where there are tight limits on what personal
information can be collected and how long it can be kept. Companies
caught crossing the line can provoke furious backlashes among their
users.
The American political landscape, by comparison, is amorphous
when it comes to privacy. There are widespread concerns on both the
right and left but no single, coherent constituency demanding
greater protections.
For all the talk in recent years about online privacy, data-
hungry Google remains the most popular search engine and data-
hungry Facebook the most popular social media site. Both worked
closely with the campaigns and also have growing lobbying operations
in Washington. Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was a
regular visitor at Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters, say those
who worked there, offering advice to the campaign's data-savvy
technologists.
Privacy advocates say the tide will eventually turn, when
Americans truly understand the extent to which their information is
collected and traded. A recent poll by the University of
Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communications found that nearly
two-thirds of people would be less likely to support a candidate who
bought data about voters' online activities and used it to tailor
political ads.
"People still don't quite understand this stuff," said Joseph
Turow, the lead researcher on the Annenberg poll. He said
politicians are "hoping people will, quote-unquote, get used to it."
