What Will the 2022 Elections Mean for Data Privacy?

I remember well a conversation that I had about data privacy in October 2016 with a very successful private-equity investor who also happened to have his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, during which he said, “Why should I care about data privacy or whether I’m being tracked everywhere by apps and marketers? I have nothing to hide.”

Despite my protest that privacy is a fundamental right and critical to the functioning of a democratic society, he waved me off as being paranoid and went about showing me the view from his New York City penthouse apartment.

One year later, this same fellow was sending photos to friends of him carrying signs and picketing in the streets of NYC, protesting a visit by Donald Trump. Somehow, though, he never made the connection that a huge reason for the 2016 election result was the microtargeting of voters based on data collected by tech platforms – due to the very same lack of data privacy protections we had debated only a year before.

And despite the well-publicized testimony in Congress of former Facebook employees about this practice of unrestricted microtargeting of consumers, most voters haven’t made the connection between the need for strong data privacy protections and free and fair elections in a democracy.

Irrespective of someone’s political inclinations, what’s not debatable is that federal and state elections laws have not been updated to reflect this new reality of voter targeting. And, just as political campaigns are required to disclose sources of funding and where they spend their TV budgets, data privacy protections must be enacted that require disclosure of the data sources used to target and classify voters by political candidates.

Going a step further, disclosure of how voters are classified should also be required, to expose campaigns that intentionally target voters who are most susceptible to specific types of misinformation.

Data Privacy Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult

How hard would this be to implement in practice? Not very. Setting aside the political realities of getting such a law passed so that these disclosures are, in fact, required, the mechanics of doing this would be less difficult than the financial disclosures already required.

Political campaigns are essentially marketing campaigns, and digital marketing platforms and services already have the capabilities in place to track the necessary data in their campaign reporting functions. It’s simply a matter of ensuring that these campaign reports on data usage and voter classification are disclosed as part of the public record.

Want to target a particular voter segment via Google or The Trade Desk? Just browse their marketplaces and select which segments you’d like to test. With new data privacy regulations in place, that usage will automatically be logged. Want to match a specially designed voter classification system to available voter data? Load that directly into your marketing platform as well, and that classification system will be documented and used to match against available consumer IDs.

Greater transparency. What would be the impact on data privacy and voter transparency? Massive. Just as finance contribution laws are in place to shine light on otherwise opaque dealings, this type of data disclosure law would allow watchdogs and voters to see exactly where the data used to target them was coming from and how voters were targeted by each campaign.

For example, “passionate about tax reform and fiscally conservative” or “reproductive rights advocate” might be acceptable and noncontroversial ways to categorize voters by campaigns. By contrast, “supports XYZ conspiracy theory and consumes all content on the topic” would likely draw the attention of media outlets. It would also be of keen interest to swing voters, especially if they view data privacy and the ethical use of data as key issues.

Such a system could also give documented proof of classifying users based on their tendency to react to misinformation, as opposed to their response to legitimate information about issues. Ideally, this would allow for open public debate as to whether such targeting should be disallowed or even penalized, with fines similar to those for campaign finance violations.

Granted, certain platforms have taken the step of banning political advertising in the run-up to Election Day. However, this doesn’t prevent voters from being targeted via other channels, such as email or smaller social platforms desperate for revenue.

To this day, I don’t know if my private-equity friend has changed his tune on data privacy. Hopefully, he has and is supporting candidates and organizations that work toward transparent, ethical voter-targeting frameworks.

Regardless of the view of this one individual, what is clear is that microtargeting of voters is a powerful tool – in many ways, just as powerful as the funding provided by campaign contributions – so it’s vital that we create a legal framework around the use of microtargeting in our politics.

Most importantly, it’s the responsibility of our government, our marketing platforms and each of us as U.S. citizens to ensure that we create data privacy regulations that help our democracy evolve, rather than devolve, for the good of the next generation.