How well does the next president of the United States know you?
Depends on your apps.
By virtue of what you install on your computer or cellphone, your political preferences can become part of the soup of data that ad networks can mine - in this case on behalf of the presidential hopefuls, who are making their last push for reluctant or undecided voters.
The Facebook apps of the Obama and Romney campaigns inhale a lot of information about you and your friends. Like many apps on Facebook, they gather your Facebook ‘likes' and locations, along with your Facebook friends' ‘likes' and locations. Both can post content on your behalf; the Obama campaign app can even post what political contributions you have made.
Brian Kennish, founder of Disconnect.me, which offers browser plug-ins to stave off the data collection, points out the weirdest feature. The Obama app “initiates an unencrypted client-side request to get your profile,†which means that if you're using a public wireless connection, anyone with access to the network can see you're using the app.
As for the campaigns' mobile apps, both have little pieces of code embedded in them to enable tracking. Both the Obama and Romney mobile apps send user data to a variety of companies, to serve ads and analyze user behavior, according to an analysis of both by PrivacyChoice, a firm based in Santa Cruz.
In its analysis, PrivacyChoice found that both the Obama and Romney apps sent data to ad networks, though the Obama campaign app appeared to send data to more of them. That would allow the incumbent to send ads not just while a would-be voter was using the Obama app, but also potentially when she was playing a game on her cellphone or reading the news.
Jim Brock, the company founder, observed that digital reach of both campaigns showed how much politicians had come to rely on the harvest of personal data. “The idea that government can regulate a bus iness it has become so dependent on is perhaps a fantasy,†he said.
Boston-based Abine, meanwhile, released what it calls a Val-You calculator that seeks to measure how much politicians are willing to pay to advertise to a particular voter. It is based not only on whether you live in a battleground state. It also looks at how much news you consume online and whether you're on Facebook.
Finally, secure.me, a San Francisco-based privacy start-up, compared how political parties collected Facebook data in this country and in Canada and Germany. In those countries, the biggest parties also use Facebook to reach voters, but refrain from grabbing data about their Facebook friends, according to secure.me.
