One exception: California residents who can avail themselves of disclosure and deletion rights in the California Consumer Privacy Act. again, so in 2020 we will have no rights,” he said. “No campaign is making the mistake of exporting data to the U.K. He wouldn’t even have been able to make a legal case for his profile had Cambridge Analytica not shipped it to the U.K., leaving it subject to local data-protection laws. Carroll would not have seen his complete file had an insider not passed a cache of data to Channel 4. Third, we have few ways of seeing the fruits of this intelligence gathering. He criticized the lack of transparency and added that the bigger problem is the application of this information for such tricks as voter suppression: “The data itself is not necessarily nefarious, it’s the use that matters.” “It’s fair to say that the Republicans and Democrats in general use comparable analytics files,” Carroll said. Moderator Dave Troy asked Carroll about similar efforts on the Democratic side, such as the Obama campaign’s groundbreaking 2008 work with the microtargeting firm Catalist. “These don’t have to be that accurate, they just have to help find targets.” Channel 4 reported, for example, that Cambridge had filed many Black voters under a “Deterrence” label for people to be targeted with messages discouraging them from voting. “It’s sort of like fishing,” Carroll said in his talk.

Second, even limited and inaccurate data could still yield considerable value for a political campaign. Citing a “NULL” value listed for social-media use, Carroll said “I’m a very frequent Twitter user, and they didn’t pick up on that!” He also called out errors in facts as basic as his household size and his history of making political donations.

David carroll professor privacy pro