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Content type: Explainer
24th February 2020
Television offers some of the earliest instances of digital marketing. The majority of television channels rely on commercials and advertisements to maintain their operations. For the past 75 years, TV adverts have been passive transmissions broadcast to viewers, the demographics of the channels audience guiding the kinds of products and services shown during commercial breaks and intermissions. With the changes in the way individuals are now consuming content however, broadcasters are trying…
Content type: News & Analysis
30th April 2020
Political campaigns around the world have turned into sophisticated data operations. They rely on data- your data- to facilitate a number of decisions: where to hold rallies, which States or constituencies to focus resources on, which campaign messages to focus on in which area, and how to target supporters, undecided voters, and non-supporters.
While data driven political campaigns are not new, the granularity of data available and the potential power to sway or suppress voters through that…
Content type: Explainer
5th August 2019
Recently the role of social media and search platforms in political campaigning and elections has come under scrutiny. Concerns range from the spread of disinformation, to profiling of users without their knowledge, to micro-targeting of users with tailored messages, to interference by foreign entities, and more. Significant attention has been paid to the transparency of political ads - what are companies doing to provide their users globally with meaningful transparency into how they're being…
Content type: News & Analysis
24th June 2020
Last week, Facebook announced that it would allow voters in the United States to opt out of seeing social issue, electoral or political ads from candidates in their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Whilst Facebook’s attempt to increase the agency of users during the election period is commendable, the binary choice left to voters to either see political ads or not see them at all is a limited and short-sighted one.
Real transparency concerns are still unaddressed
Whilst Facebook enables users…
Content type: News & Analysis
3rd April 2019
PI has today written to Google, Instagram, Snapchat, TicTok, Twitter, YouTube, and WhatsApp to ask for more information about their steps to tell people why they are seeing ads. Facebook recently announced expanding the company's ad transparency measures to include more information about why an ad or content appears in a user's newsfeed. While Facebook has a lot more to do, it is important that all technology companies provide advertising transparency.
Recently, we have seen how platforms…
Content type: News & Analysis
10th June 2014
In the coming year, the elections to be held in Nigeria, Indonesia, Turkey, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Tunisia will be closely watched. Not only will the international community be monitoring the elections, but domestic governments could be monitoring their own citizens at the ballot box.
When courageous citizens brave uncertain political and societal contexts to exercise one of their fundamental human rights - the right to vote - they will rely on another fundamental human right - privacy. Privacy…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
In July 2018, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), long the top US manufacturer of voter machines, admitted in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that it had installed pcAnywhere remote access software and modems on a number of the election management systems it had sold between 2000 and 2006. The admission was in direct contradiction to the company's response for a New York Times article earlier in the year on US voting machines' vulnerability to hacking. ES&S says it stopped…
Content type: News & Analysis
2nd June 2017
Image source: AFP
Earlier this month, the Kenyan daily The Star reported that UK-based data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had been quietly contracted by President Uhuru Kenyatta’s party in a bid to win himself a second term in office. State House officials were quick to deny the claims, while the company itself issued no comment.
Cambridge Analytica has exploded onto the scene following revelations that its psychometric profiling techniques were used and reportedly played a role in both…
Content type: Video
21st April 2019
In April 2019 Ukraine held presidential elections. We were in Kyiv to hear about people's experience monitoring online disinformation – a big issue in this election. Activists in Ukraine have long experience navigating the noisy and chaotic environment that disinformation creates – which comes not only from Russia, but also from domestic politicians and others with money and power.
At PI, we’re working to make sure that the way data is used by political actors and advertisers does…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
In the run-up to the November 2018 US midterm elections, Vice tested Facebook's new system of mandatory "Paid for" disclosure intended to bring greater transparency to the sources of ads relating to "issues of national importance". Placing political ads requires a valid ID and proof of residence. Vice found that Facebook quickly approved ads the site attempted to place that named Islamic State, US vice president Mike Pence, and Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez in the "Paid for"…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
A combination of entrenched and litigious voting machine manufacturers with immense control over their proprietary software and a highly complex and fragmented voting infrastructure mean that even though concerns were raised as early as 2004 about the security of US voting machines, the 2018 midterm election saw little improvement. The machines in use in the more than 10,000 US election jurisdictions are all either optical-scan or direct-recording electronic (DRE). Optical-scan, which scans…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
In the months leading up to the US 2018 midterm elections, Republican officials in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina made moves they described as ensuring voting integrity but which critics saw as blocking voter access. In Georgia, where Secretary of State Brian Kemp is charged with enforcing election law and was simultaneously running for governor, election officials blocked 53,000 applications to register, 70% of which are those of African-Americans, under a law requiring personal…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
A December 2018 report prepared by the Oxford Internet Institute's Computational propaganda Research Project and the network analysis firm Graphika for the US Senate Intelligence Committee found that the campaign conducted by Russia's Internet Research Agency during the 2016 US presidential election used every major social media platform to deliver messages in words, images, and videos to help elect Donald Trump - and stepped up efforts to support him once he assumed office. The report relied…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016, supporters of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul for president were surprised to begin getting emails from the Trump campaign soon after their candidates dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination. In an investigation, CNNMoney found that nearly every failed 2016 presidential candidate sold, rented, or loaned their supporters' email addresses to other candidates, marketers, charities, and private companies. From analysing thousands of emails and Federal Election Commission records,…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
Facebook's latest tool for inspecting political ads showed that in the run-up to the US mid-term elections in November 2018, many of the same politicians who had been questioning Facebook about privacy and leaked user data were spending campaign funds on advertisements on the service. Between 2014 and 2018, the digital percentage of political spending rose from 1% to 22% (or about $1.9 billion); between May and November 2018 political spending on Facebook and its subsidiaries came to nearly $…
Content type: Long Read
11th July 2018
Yesterday the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) - which is responsible for ensuring people's personal data is protected - announced it intends to fine Facebook the maximum amount possible for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
This decision highlights of how serious and rampant misuse and exploitation of data is. Facebook is responsible and failed to comply with data protection 101: be upfront and honest about what you are doing with people's data.
Importantly, the ICO's…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
After investigation, the UK's privacy regulatory, the Information Commissioner's Office has found that two small sections of the written scripts used by Blue Telecoms, a marketing firm that made calls on behalf of the Conservative Party during the 2017 general election, crossed the line from legitimate market research to unlawful direct marketing. The ICO has issued a warning to the Conservative Party rather than launching a formal regulatory action because, it says, the overall campaign was…
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…
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: Examples
20th December 2018
In 2018, the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined Emma's Diary, a site offering pregnancy and childcare advice owned by Lifecycle Marketing (Mother and Baby) Ltd, £140,000 for collecting and selling personal information belonging to more than 1 million people without disclosing in the site's privacy policy how it would be used. Although Lifecycle denied the allegations, the ICO found that the company sold the data to Experian Marketing Services to build into profiles for use by the…
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
20th December 2018
In November 2018, the UK government announced it would pilot voter ID for in 11 local authorities during thte 2019 local elections in order to gain insight into ensuring voting security and lowering the risk of voter fraud. The Cabinet Office deemed the pilots conducted in five local authorities during the 2018 local elections to be a success. Four models of checking are under consideration: photo ID (Pendle, East Staffordshire, Woking); one photo or up to two non-photo IDs (Ribble Valley,…
Content type: News & Analysis
27th October 2020
Privacy International (PI) welcomes today's report from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes. As a result, the ICO has ordered the credit reference agency Experian to make fundamental changes to how it handles people's personal data within its offline direct marketing services.
It is a long overdue enforcement action against Experian.
Read our Q&A on the report here.…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
In 2018, after the UK Cabinet Office said a trial of compulsory voter ID was necessary because reports of voter fraud had more than doubled between the 2014 and 2016 elections - a claim immediately disputed by a voter and upheld by the UK Statistics Authority. While it was true that there were 21 reports in 2014 and 44 in 2016, the number fell to 28 in 2017, small numbers to begin with. Crucially, more than twice as many people voted in 2016, the year of the EU referendum. None of the five…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
A 2018 study found that Twitter bots played a disproportionate role in spreading the false claim, made by US President Donald Trump shortly after winning the election but losing the popular vote in November 2016, that 3 million illegal immigrants had voted for Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. After examining 14 million messages shared on Twitter between May 2016 and May 2017, Indiana University researchers found that just 6% of Twitter accounts identified as bots spread 31% of "low-…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
A little over a month before the US 2018 midterm elections, Twitter updated its rules to reduce manipulation of its platform. Among the changes, the company outlined the factors it would use to determine whether an account is fake and should be removed, provided an update on its automated detection and enforcement actions, and announced some changes to its user interface, which included reminding candidates to turn on two-factor authentication and encouraging US voters to register and vote.…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
A few months before the US 2018 midterm elections, the Trump campaign team signed a contract with the newly-formed Virginia-based company Excelsior Strategies to exploit the first-party data the campaign had collected. The contract was set up by Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who built the list as the digital director of Trump's 2016 campaign and began renting it out soon after the November 2016 elections.
Subject to the Trump's campaign veto authority, Excelsior rents out this…
Content type: News & Analysis
22nd January 2020
On New Year's Day, the Twitter account @HindsightFiles began publishing internal communications and documents from the now defunct SCL Group, dating from 2014-2018. They came from the hard drive of Brittany Kaiser, who held several senior positions at SCL Group including at one of its subsidiaries, Cambridge Analytica, and featured in the Netflix documentary "The Great Hack".
Privacy International first investigated Cambridge Analytica in 2017. We questioned the company's role in the Kenyan…