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Content type: Press release
31st October 2019
Privacy International, Open Rights Group, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Fair Vote, Who Targets Me? and Demos have today written to all the main UK political parties, demanding that they are transparent with the public about how they are using voters’ personal data in their electioneering. Twitter's announcement yesterday of their ban on political advertising is just the latest wake up call to politicians about the risks to democracy of personal data driven microtargeting of political…
Content type: Long Read
18th June 2019
The UK public, regulators, and parliamentarians have all expressed concern about the wide use of third-party data by all political parties in the UK and its impact on privacy and democracy. In the week the remaining six candidates to be the UK’s next Prime Minister are reduced to two, Privacy International takes a look at their privacy policies to illustrate how such policies can be used to identify the use of third-party data by political candidates from all political parties.
The race to…
Content type: News & Analysis
30th April 2019
The first half of 2018 saw two major privacy moments: in March, the Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, followed in May by the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") taking effect. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, as it has become known, grabbed the attention and outrage of the media, the public, parliamentarians and regulators around the world - demonstrating that yes, people do care about violations of their privacy and abuse of power. This scandal has been one of many that…
Content type: Advocacy
30th April 2019
In December 2018, PI responded to the UK Information Commissioner's (ICO) Call for Views on a Code of Practice for the use of personal information in political campaigns.
The consultation followed on from the ICO's policy report Democracy Disrupted?, published in July 2018, which recommended that the Government should legislate at the earliest opportunity to introduce a statutory Code of Practice under the Data Protection Act 2018 for the use of personal information in campaigns.
Although not…
Content type: News & Analysis
30th April 2019
This piece was first published in GDPR today in March 2019.
Elections, referendums and political campaigns around the world are becoming ever more sophisticated data operations. This raises questions about the political use and abuse of personal data. With the European Union elections fast approaching and numerous national and local elections taking place across EU Member States, it is essential that the legal frameworks intended to protect our personal data do just that.
Member State laws…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
On January 9, 2019 the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined SCL Elections, also known as Cambridge Analytica, £15,000 for failure to comply with an enforcement notice the ICO issued in May 2018 ordering the company to respond in full to a subject access request submitted by US-based academic David Carroll. The company was also required to pay £6,000 in costs and a victim surcharge of £170. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham noted that UK data protection laws apply to all data…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
The results of a year-long review issued by the UK Information Commissioner's Office in November 2018 uncovered a "disturbing disregard for voters' personal privacy" on the part of 30 organisations, including social media platforms, political parties, data brokers, and credit reference agencies. Based on information uncovered during the investigation, the ICO sent 11 warning letters requiring action by the main political parties, and announced its intention to conduct audits; issued an…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
In 2019, a prominent page on the Facebook Business site cited the British Conservative Party as a "success story" at the 2015 general election, which put the party into power with a narrow majority. The site boasted that via Facebook the Conservatives had an 80.6% reach in key constituencies, 3.5 million video views, and a social context for 86.9% of all the ads served - and that as a result the party had defied the polls and achieved an outright majority.
https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
In November 2018, the UK government announced that 11 local authorities across England would participate in Voter ID pilots in the interest of gaining "further insight into how best to ensure the security of the voting process and reduce the risk of voter fraud". Five local authorities participated in pilots in the 2017 general election. The new pilots will test four models of identification checks: photo ID (Pendle, East Staffordshire, Woking), photo and non-photo ID (Ribble Valley, Broxtowe,…
Content type: News & Analysis
18th February 2019
Privacy International welcomes the focus on data and privacy contained in the final report by the UK House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS) on Disinformation and ‘fake news’. Beyond our control, companies and political parties have banded together to exploit our data. This report establishes essential steps to remedying this downward spiral. An important part of the democratic process is freedom of expression and right to political participation, including the right…
Content type: Examples
9th February 2019
A flaw in the official 2018 UK Conservative Party conference app granted both read and write access to the private data of senior party members, including cabinet ministers, to anyone who logged in by second-guessing the email address they used to sign into the app. Twitter users claimed that one leading politician, Boris Johnson, had his avatar briefly replaced by a pornographic image, while another, Michael Gove, had his replaced by that of media magnate Rupert Murdoch. The app was created by…