Security News > 2020 > October > Political campaigns adopt surveillance capitalism at their own peril

The tactics associated with surveillance capitalism - the commodification of personal data for profit as mastered by companies like Google and Facebook - have followed the same path.

The race between competing political campaigns to out-collect, out-analyze and out-leverage voter data has raised concerns about the damaging effects it has on privacy and democratic participation, but also about the fact that all of this data, if seized by adversarial nation-states, opens up opportunities for affecting an election and sowing electoral chaos.

The real magic happens when this data is augmented with other datasets that are purchased directly from a data broker or shared from outside political groups through the national party's data exchange.

In addition to purchased data, presidential campaigns have another tool for getting information directly from supporters: the campaign app.

In the absence of a national data privacy law or stricter campaign data regulations, there's very little that any one of us can do, short of living off the grid, to prevent our personal data from being fodder for campaigns and threat actors alike.

News URL

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HelpNetSecurity/~3/iuzACsdR5zs/