UK General Election 2017: How EU law will hit British politicians' Facebook fight

If something is free, YOU are the product being sold

Facebook. Google.

Data gathering whores, selling you for profit.

Confession time

I was asked to act as a "teller" outside of the local polling station for the council elections. It wasn't too bad; a nice day, some interesting people, very light work. All I had to do was ask people for their polling number, write it down, and then direct them to the correct door. (That polling station covered several wards)

Some people were a bit obnoxious; OK, if you don' want to tell me your number, not a problem. I wasn't asking how they voted, and TBH I couldn't care. I just recorded it as a null so that we still had an understanding of the number voting.

Part of the reason for this is to act as a check; the numbers were shared between the parties, and as long as those numbers more or less equated to the turnout, they were happy. If the number of votes cast was much higher than the number of people passing through the door however....

The parties also use the details to check who of their likely supporters has voted or not. They generally check those details and start calling around later in the day. I actually gave some thought to streamlining the process, and considered that a small mobile device with voice recognition software might actually allow the data to be entered more efficiently and accurately, plus it could be really up to date.

On top of that, I can see some interesting possibilities for the data analysis; combining it with electoral register and various other information, and you might be able to see what time people vote, try and see if there are relationships to social factors etc. I was getting quite excited by the possibilities.

Unfortunately, it is far more likely that people would be worried about this data being misused (and with some justification). I suspect that this is what might hold back many other ideas; and again, I can see why sometimes these ideas are great on paper, but dangerous if in the wrong hands.

The Data Protection Act clearly requires processing of data to take place in countries and using data processors that comply with EU Data Protection principles. For obvious reasons, many US companies do not meet these requirements.

Wrong. Privacy Shield is still, legally, in force. God knows why. but it is.

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/international-transfers/eu-us-privacy-shield/index_en.htm

That's enough to cover data transfer, storage and processing in the US. Otherwise every US-based site that collects any PII and doesn't have an EU-based DC to handle all EU customers' data would be breaking the law.

GDPR Consent

Reading this article one might easily come away with the wrong impression about GDPR Consent. Consent is just one of six possible lawful reasons. The others are necessity to fulfill a contract, compliance, in someone's vital interest, in the public interest and necessary for the legitimate interests of the data controller.

Expect the political parties (and Microsoft, Google and Facebook) to be making much use of the last two. Want to challenge it - do you have better paid lawyers than Google?

Give it up

The way things are going there every chance that the Tories will win this election and that by the time you are all ready for the next election, Facebook will be handling it.

It's Election Day - please log into Facebook and cast your vote ...

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper

re: "use of algorithms by politicians to swing votes"

Surely it's far too late to go after algorithms now...

...most of the real work will have been done years ago making sure that the constituency boundaries were drawn up 'just so' to allow the vote to go the way of those drawing the lines...

I guess politicians see Facebook users..

as a large resource of easily influenced morons - and I guess they are right - ahhh well.

900 people

Yes, only a few people could change the result of the election. After the election you can see where they are. Before the election? Much much harder.

Most of the effort in canvassing isn't about persuading. People are incredibly difficult to persuade. In all my years of canvassing I can't honestly say I got anyone to change their mind. As you indicated it's about differential turnout. Find out who your supporters are and get the buggers to vote. That is why people sit on polling stations, and collect the data.

If you're worried about the influence of Facebook or big data on that then there is an incredibly easy solution. Make voting compulsory.

Shuttleworth pads

Shuttleworths appear to have been named after the printing firm which sold them to the Liberal party. They have also been known as Mikardo pads (the election team in Reading for Labour MP Ian Mikardo may have invented their use). Tories called them Reading pads.

The early forms using carbon paper could have been run off by any printer with a pen ruling machine for making ledgers. Printing and gluing ncr forms was a trickier job so parties commissioned big batches centrally.

A pen ruling machine in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmhqqRzzPgM

'The LibDems might discover that a certain voter may be persuaded sooner by Vince Cable than by Tim Farron.'

Although 'neither' would seem to be the more likely option.

Data Gathering...

Every elector in my house recently received an individually addressed "survey" from one of the political parties recently at our house which superficially was asking for opinions on local issues. Name filled in so you would have to delete it if you anted to stay anonymous. In very small print in odd part of document was an authorisation for full reuse of all info in data processing etc which you had to check to *disallow*. And just in case you were tempted to anonymise yourself in even smaller print in an obscure corner was a number which turned out, by checking with the other copies, to be a unique identifier.

And they wonder why so few of us trust any of them any further than we can throw them!

How to clean up British politics

Install uBlock Origin or Adblock in your browser and avoid the Today programme and PM on Radio 4.

Ignorance is bliss.

Unfortunately, thanks to the masses

The future is Borg.

Literally.

>After all, if this data science is really so flimsy, how come banks and supermarkets and mobile phone companies have invested so much in it over the years?

To misquote Lord Leverhulme, "half of my data science is wasted - but I don't know which half."

...parties can fall back on the DPA as GDPR will grant similar rights to organisations to store an individual’s data but not to process it any further.

In other words, "none at all", per the Fifith Principle?

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/principle-5-retention/