As time goes by more and more people are becoming aware that virtually everything you do on the Internet you are doing in public. Every site you visit, every keystroke you make, every word you publish is subject to being watched, recorded and shared. It's one thing for shoe makers to do it, quite another when it's Obama.
Obama for America has already invested millions of dollars in sophisticated Internet messaging, marketing and fundraising efforts that rely on personal data sometimes offered up voluntarily — like posts on a Facebook page— but sometimes not.
And according to a campaign official and former Obama staffer, the campaign’s Chicago-based headquarters has built a centralized digital database of information about millions of potential Obama voters.
It all means Obama is finding it easier than ever to merge offline data, such as voter files and information purchased from data brokers, with online information to target people with messages that may appeal to their personal tastes. Privacy advocates say it’s just the sort of digital snooping that his new privacy project is supposed to discourage...
Both Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee declined to discuss how they specifically gather or use personal information...
Obama’s campaign website, BarackObama.com, features a 2,600-word privacy policy that acknowledges, in addition to describing how it collects and uses information, that it shares personal information with some third parties, including “vendors, consultants, and other service providers or volunteers” as well as “candidates, organizations, groups or causes that we believe have similar political viewpoints, principles or objectives.”
It also states that the campaign “may also collect information about the type of mobile device you use, your device’s unique ID, the type of mobile Internet browsers you use, and information about the location of your device.”
For some privacy advocates the data disconnect between Obama’s administration and campaign is tantamount to hypocrisy. [Politico]
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