Privacy, accountability, and access in the age of the personalized campaign

Abstract

In the last eight years, there has been little progress made on updating our nation's outdated and ineffective privacy laws. While the cost of data has plummeted and entire new industries have been created around storing, analyzing, and sorting large sets of data, our legislators have done little to ensure that regulation has kept up with the pace of technological progress. Instead, they have harnessed these powerful tools to advance their own interests by transforming the way they run their campaigns. The age of the "personalized campaign" is here - and voters, whether they like it or not, are now being aggressively courted based on their attributes, habits, and behaviors. There are major implications ahead for the future of the quality of our nation's democracy. As both parties engage in an arms race to gather the most information and the most sophisticated data analytics technology, a public increasingly disillusioned with politics doesn't seem to have any meaningful way to "opt-out." Without any real legal obligation to disclose what they know and how they use the personal information they collect, campaigns have successfully been able to argue that their activities constitute "political speech." A term that was once a critical and valuable protection for free speech is now used as cover for political operatives to act in a non-transparent manner. Many of the same actions used by advertisers that we see as invasive or creepy are now used by the very people we trust to govern our society. Campaigns have reasonably argued that if they were to reveal their tactics, they would be giving away a competitive advantage that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. But this raises larger questions as what new types of barriers to entry this creates for candidates. There are serious questions as to how this will effect those who are not permitted access to these vast troves of information and those who are not able to afford the types of technology needed to now compete in a modern election. It remains to be seen how this will empower incumbents or damage third party challengers outside of the mainstream of the political process. The "filter bubble" that has created a world online where each of us sees different content and information has now come to our political process. While this can allow people to hear about the issues that an algorithm thinks they care about most, it can also serve to isolate us even further along partisan lines. When politicians are only focus on telling us the things that we want to hear, it may further degrade the integrity of the entire voting process. Four years is a long time in the world of computing, and the technological capabilities of campaigns in 2016 are sure to dwarf what we saw in the most recent election. There are new opportunities to connect with voters while trying to identify what they care about most that can lead to a more engaging, fulfilling election -- and there are ways to make voting more relevant and efficient. But it is not without consequences. In a process where winning is everything, will campaigns finally set up and institute the proper accountability and oversight that voters deserve.