As North Carolina’s GOP continues its tradition of shenanigans, until just a couple of days ago, the North Carolina GOP had a web site up called Vote.GOP. EQV Analytics took a look at the site and came to a few conclusions:
The exact same service – without any of Vote.GOP’s privacy concerns – is already available at the North Carolina State Board of Elections website itself, so Vote.GOP actually delivers no value to the voter, while proving valuable indeed to the GOP by collecting the voter’s detailed personal identifying information.
They use their brand name as a way to collect private information from trusting voters.
But our analysis of Vote.GOP finds it worse than merely useless. It can, in fact, actually cause innocent voters to be purged from the North Carolina poll book, disenfranchising them.
See their analysis for the how of it, but it’s certainly a good fit with GOP voter suppression tactics nation-wide. But …
But why would Vote.GOP treat the voting rights of what are likely to be its mostly Republican users with such obvious disregard? Our review of the site’s Javascript code offers a likely answer.
Every visit to Vote.GOP peppers the user’s browser with tracking cookies, web beacons, and data-harvesting code, including code attributed to a division of Tremor International, an Israeli advertising technology company whose RhythmOne subsidiary touts its ability to harvest web users’ “demographics, psychographics, shares (including dark social media), interests, purchase behaviors, and browsing habits.” Linking up that sort of profiling with the highly personal identifying information that Vote.GOP users give away is the holy grail of campaign advertising. It enables precision micro-targeting of just the right message to exactly the voter most likely to be persuaded by it, just as Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign in 2016.
Knowing that, it’s easier to understand why Vote.GOP’s developers paid only cursory attention to building a functional voter assistance service: because it’s really all about capturing vulnerable voters’ personal data.
I notice that EQV Analytics discusses how RhythmOne is trying to emulate the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, and yet may be skipping over a far more serious concern[1]. Because the user is now identifiable, specific activities can be connected to that user. And if those activities are in the least questionable – a dark social media site, a visit to a porn site, or any other site which is questionable in the reader’s context, and now there’s leverage. It’s illicit, morally dubious, and fits right in with the North Carolina GOP’s game plan.
It may seem unlikely that extortion could be used on such a scale for either monetary or electoral gain, but don’t be so sure. Computers are great for automating these sorts of things cheaply, so who says this sort of data collection couldn’t be turned into a stream of blackmail dollars? Some relatively simple work on the end-result collection end to isolate any damage done by victims who call in the police, and even a rupture of the scheme might be contained without rupturing the balance of the scheme.
A morality-free couple of operatives could set this up, using some technical help which is already available.
1 And I do not take the Precision Messaging facet lightly, either. Precision messaging should be renamed to Precision, Personal, & Private Message (PPPM), because that enumerates the important facets of the operationality of this technique. What does this mean? Precision means the message can be personalized to the profile of the intended reader; Personal means the reader is identifiable; and Private, the most important of all, means the message can be anything at all, unlike a public message which is subject to immediate analysis and comparison to previous messages. No connection to honesty or consistency is required. You may receive a PPPM that says the Candidate is for A, while your neighbor, who hates A, receives a PPPM that says the Candidate is against A. Now, obviously, if you talk to your neighbor, you may detect that inconsistency. Or you may not.
And that’s how you steal votes.
I personally believe PPPM should be made illegal.
