PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
When you walk into the voting booth on Nov. 7, will you leave the curtain open while you mull the ballot and pull the lever? Probably not. A strong tenet of our national political culture is the notion that how we vote is nobody else's business. But thanks to the data-gathering power of software and the Internet, voters in this election season are more subject to losses of political privacy than ever before. And it's going to get a lot worse.
Both major political parties are using increasingly sophisticated data-mining techniques to reach and influence voters. Republicans in Iowa, for example, are using a software program created by a GOP-backed, Vermont-based company called Map Applications Inc. The software, called GeoVoter, can link as many as 5,000 categories of information to an individual voter.
Using it, a GOP campaign worker can identify the state's estimated 1.5 million registered voters based on their age, ethnicity, religion, marital and socioeconomic status, the value of their homes, their stand on issues like abortion, and whether they have a bank card or own a gun. This data helps GeoVoter make assumptions about what issues most determine how you're likely to vote.
"The software enables us to manipulate data on the state's registered voters and it also houses various attributes that we append to various voters' records," says Dee Stewart, executive director of the Republican Party of Iowa. "It enables you to target whose door you're knocking on, whose mailbox you're sending mail to, and who's telephone you're calling with your message."
GETTING PERSONAL. On election day, GOP campaign workers, taking their cues from the worlds of marketing and e-commerce, will tape personalized letters on the front doors of thousands of voters in Missouri and Iowa, critical states for George W. Bush and other Republican candidates. Some, using e-mail addresses sold by private data-marketing firms, will target e-mail political ads to individual voters. People who recently hinted to GOP telephone solicitors concern about taxes or, say gay rights, guns, or abortion will receive letters or e-mails highlighting those issues. People who don't vote often will get personal letters reminding them to vote or asking if they need a ride to the polls.
Sure, you could argue that data-mining by politicians could eventually lead to better representation of the public's views on Capitol Hill or in city hall. But I doubt it. At least in these early days of the Internet infiltrating politics, the potential for manipulation and abuse seems pretty high. And the burgeoning science of voter-snooping is getting more sophisticated all the time.
Companies and special interests, from the National Rifle Assn. to the Christian Coalition to the Sierra Club, are moving to combine information about voters they've culled from government records with commercial data and info collected by online marketers. Take a look Aristotle International Inc., a company that collects and keeps detailed voting data on 150 million registered voters.
E-DOSSIERS. Aristotle, which has plans to go public, amended its IPO prospectus filed on Sept. 1 with the Securities & Exchange Commission to reflect that it has signed a contract with online marketer MatchLogic Inc., which collects detailed consumer data on millions of Web surfers -- often without their knowledge or permission. MatchLogic tracks what people buy and where they go while they surf the Web, then builds e-dossiers on individual consumers for marketing purposes, which can then be sold to third parties.
Under the deal, Aristotle will buy $3.5 million worth of targeted banner ads and e-mail addresses and an extra $2 million worth of targeted advertising services over the next two years. In exchange, MatchLogic has agreed to share any revenue it gets from sales of targeted ads that make use of Aristotle's voter database. Voting records -- including 50 million that contain data from U.S. motor vehicle departments -- are getting merged with commercial records for the purpose of more accurately and effectively getting folks to back certain candidates and buy specific products, from cars to magazines.
An Aristotle spokesperson referred all questions to its SEC filing, which says its political clients "include 45 U.S. senators, more than 200 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, approximately 46 Democratic and Republican state parties, and numerous national advocacy groups and consulting firms." The company says that "of the top 50 fund-raisers for the Senate and top 50 fund-raisers for the House during the 1999-2000 election cycle, 72% of Senate candidates and 66% of these House candidates used at least one of our data products or services." (Business Week, too, has used public information gathered by Aristotle in its election coverage.)
It's unlikely that Congress would vote to bar practices that benefit its members in their campaigns
This might make for more effective persuasion and good earnings, but does it make for good business? From the standpoint of pure profits, maybe so. But this blending of public and private data to build more detailed e-dossiers for governments and commercial interests raises new questions about whether private citizens' interests are being well-served.
What bothers me is it's unlikely that the Senate or House would vote to bar the practice, given that many lawmakers are benefiting from such services, and might in the future. But at the least, regulators such as the Federal Election Commission or even the Federal Trade Commission should look at these practices.
In fact, the pols who are using these techniques are well aware of how their actions might be perceived by the public. Iowa's Stewart advises political operatives using such data to be subtle about what they say when communicating with individual voters. Stewart says that as consultants race to get more and more detailed data about voters in this and future elections, "it will be increasingly important to downplay the vast amounts of data being collected. Rather than tell a person that you know they're pro-life, for example, you send them a pro-life message. You don't want to come off as a snoop, or you could send off warning bells."
Aristotle also sees the potential for a backlash. "The practice of matching offline marketing databases, particularly personal medical or financial information, to Web-site visitation patterns and click-stream behavior, is highly controversial," Aristotle writes in its prospectus. "Our agreement with MatchLogic is the only instance in which we match out database to online registered user information."
NO REGULATION. Still, MatchLogic is not regulated by anyone in its use of the data. And much of Aristotle's and MatchLogic's information collection occurs without voters' permission, since a lot of the data is gathered from public records, such as bankruptcy filings, divorce courts, voter-registration forms, and credit and warranty records. In the old days, it was hard to find such records, and it was prohibitively expensive to amass them in one place and combine them with other records. A MatchLogic spokesperson declined to comment.
The Net, though, makes collecting all this information possible -- though risky. Aristotle warns prospective investors, "we may face increased governmental regulation on our collection and use of sensitive information about individuals, such as their age or estimated income, which we make available to our clients." Regulation, Aristotle says, might also "limit the availability of currently public information and negatively affect us...and potential profits."
It's time for more stringent privacy regulations, before such practices extend further and while individuals can still have say over what's being collected -- and how. Your privacy is a powerful political tool. Just think about what J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon or any number of political snoopsters of yore might have done with today's technology.
So the next time you cast a vote for your candidate of choice, consider that it's just as important -- if not more important -- that you start demanding legal limits on the use and collection of your personal data, so that your vote will still be enough of a surprise to future candidates to even matter.
Stepanek's column runs twice a month on Business Week Online. She invites you to discuss these issues on our Privacy Matters forum Edited by Beth Belton
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
