a post by Josh Smith for the DEMOS blog
A few days ago, I found myself talking to a woman I had just met, running through a list of facts about her family.
The week before, Demos had been challenged by the BBC to find out as much as possible about a volunteer, using only public, online data, and starting solely from their email address and a protected Twitter handle. We weren’t allowed to spend any money, or put more than a few hours into the research. “She doesn’t think there’s much out there”, we were told. “See if you can surprise her.”
It was her mother’s history, gleaned from a public social media account, which first raised an eyebrow from our volunteer. We were able to guess, correctly, which MP she had voted for in the last three elections, and the way in which she had cast her referendum ballot. We walked through the causes she’d supported over the years, and the campaigns she felt most strongly about. The internet knew her current address, the house she had moved there from, and how much the latter had sold for. It knew the shape of her signature, and her husband’s.
This experiment does not replicate the ways in which political parties prepare for a campaign. Even the best funded groups are unlikely to have the resources to conduct their own, detailed searches on every voter. The tools for doing similar work at scale, however, already exist, and are being used in political campaigns.
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Scary but that is the way life is today.
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