The campaign's headquarters has built a centralized digital database on potential voters. Obama's campaign is watching you

President Barack Obama wants companies like Google and Facebook to reform their privacy practices.

But that’s not stopping his reelection campaign from tapping the rich data Internet companies hold on millions of potential voters.


Obama for America has already invested millions of dollars in sophisticated Internet messaging, marketing and fundraising efforts that rely on personal data sometimes offered up voluntarily — like posts on a Facebook page— but sometimes not.

And according to a campaign official and former Obama staffer, the campaign’s Chicago-based headquarters has built a centralized digital database of information about millions of potential Obama voters.

It all means Obama is finding it easier than ever to merge offline data, such as voter files and information purchased from data brokers, with online information to target people with messages that may appeal to their personal tastes. Privacy advocates say it’s just the sort of digital snooping that his new privacy project is supposed to discourage.

But this is what campaigning for president looks like in 2012. Gone are the days when campaigns cataloged voters and their preferences with index cards and filing cabinets. It’s even a quantum leap forward from 2008, when campaigns struggled to link individual voters across databases. And Republican presidential candidates are using some of the same high-tech tools.

There’s an added twist for Obama: He’s making these moves at the same moment his administration is pushing the virtues of online privacy, last month proposing a consumer bill of rights to protect it.

“All of the data used to be in different silos. You never had a central place,” said Dan Siroker, a former director of analytics for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and deputy new media director for his presidential transition team who now runs online marketing optimization firm Optimizely. “That’s different this election.”

Both Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee declined to discuss how they specifically gather or use personal information.

But an Obama campaign official stressed that the campaign and DNC, which actively works to reelect Obama, meticulously protect personal data.

“This campaign has always and will continue to be an organization that respects and takes care to protect information that people share with us,” Obama for America spokeswoman Katie Hogan said. “We go to great lengths to make sure that supporters have the ability to opt out of communication and contact from the campaign.”

Obama’s campaign website, BarackObama.com, features a 2,600-word privacy policy that acknowledges, in addition to describing how it collects and uses information, that it shares personal information with some third parties, including “vendors, consultants and other service providers or volunteers” as well as “candidates, organizations, groups or causes that we believe have similar political viewpoints, principles or objectives.”

It also states that the campaign “may also collect information about the type of mobile device you use, your device’s unique ID, the type of mobile Internet browsers you use and information about the location of your device.”

For some privacy advocates, the data disconnect between Obama’s administration and campaign is tantamount to hypocrisy.

And it comes as lawmakers, regulators, companies and privacy advocates are arguing over the very meaning of online tracking and what kinds of personal information should at least be legal, if not easy, to gather.

“The Obama campaign has to confront the contradiction that the president talks about ‘timeless privacy values,’ and then, his campaign using contemporary digital tools to operate a stunning commercial surveillance system,” says Jeff Chester, executive director for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Digital Democracy. “The idea that the Obama campaign can create a political dossier on you that they can act upon without asking permission first is outrageous.”

But online industry insiders familiar with Obama’s political operation say privacy concerns are overstated.

The president, they say, is both prudent and realistic when using personal information in a bid to reach millions of Americans with information that may interest them during a hypercompetitive political campaign.

“Campaigns can really say with some certainty that an ad is going to reach a voter they want to reach. You can target so much better now,” said Mike Liddell, director of digital services for NGP VAN, a Massachusetts-based firm that provides online fundraising, voter contact and other digital services for Obama for America and numerous other Democratic entities. “I don’t think Barack Obama is particularly at risk of misusing personal data. He is the most high-profile campaign out there, and they are really doing this the right way.”

Said Siroker: “The campaign’s focus is to win an election, while the administration — it has a very different objective. He’s sincere about privacy policy. Policy, though, is always a couple of years behind what’s happening now.”

That’s a difficult reality for a president whose benefiting from the practices he’s attempting to corral, said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a San Diego-based nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.

“It’s a classic example of the government not practicing what they preach,” Stephens said. “But in a sense, they’re forced to do so. Using personal information is very valuable to political parties, and one side is at a competitive disadvantage if it stops using it.”

Much of the Obama campaign’s online marketing efforts this election are spearheaded by contractor Washington-based Bully Pulpit Interactive, which advertises itself as a firm “founded by the digital marketers of the Obama presidential campaign” and boasts its “work doesn’t end when an ad is placed.

“In fact, that’s when the real work begins as we aggressively optimize our campaigns to set our results apart,” reads a promotional statement the company, which Obama for America has paid more than $5 million for online advertising services from July 1 to Jan. 31, according to federal campaign finance records.

In January alone, Obama for America spent more than $812,000 on Bully Pulpit Interactive’s services.

Bully Pulpit Interactive Managing Director Ben Coffey Clark declined to comment on its work with Obama for America.

But a window into the company’s operations can be found in the Chicago mayoral campaign of Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, who prioritized social media and data-based voter targeting.

Facebook itself last month published a case study on how Bully Pulpit Interactive used its services to conduct marketing campaign on behalf of Emanuel en route to his landslide victory.

The study describes how the campaign used the information Facebook’s advertising tools harvests from users to target Chicago residents, and from there, tailor specific messages to people based on the information contained on their personal profiles, such as whether educational matters interest them, or whether they follow sports.

“We couldn’t imagine having run this campaign without Facebook,” Coffey said. “By cultivating our fans over the course of the campaign, we were able to get them to take actions at a much more cost-effective and higher rate than through other platforms.”

The Obama campaign clearly paid attention.

Nonprofit reporting group ProPublica this month published the results of a crowdsourcing project that indicated the Obama campaign appeared to tailor a series of recent emails to people based on their gender, age and other personally identifying characteristics.

Such actions have notable upsides, some political activists argue.

With political entities armed with increasingly sophisticated message targeting tools, and people volunteering more and more about themselves in online realms, “you can’t have the same expectation of privacy as you once did,” said Brad Smith, chairman of the pro-free speech Center for Competitive Politics and former Federal Election Commission chairman.

Highly targeted online or telephone political messages have the advantage of reaching more people who might be receptive to them — the alternative being traditional, generalist broadcasts that are largely watched by people who won’t care, Smith said, adding that higher quality political messages help create a more robust marketplace of political ideas.

In this regard, “both camps, Republican and Democrat, have been leaders in developing more effective, efficient political messaging,” he said.

The potential downside?

“The messages may have very little to do with what the candidate really believes or intends to do and a lot more about what it thinks a certain kind of person wants to hear,” said Stephens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Beyond the Obama campaign, federal records show both national party committees are also heavily invested in personal information gathering.

The DNC in January alone spent $601,725 on vendors — 14 in all — who provide a “data service,” according to its expenditure filings.

Among the more than dozen vendors is Applied Political Technologies of Springfield, Va., which received more than $19,000 from the DNC in January.

The company advertises how it provides data that allows clients to identify people by race and ethnicity, noting on its website that its “strongest ethnic surname tables are those for Jewish, Hispanic and various Asian surnames (Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese).” It also notes its ability to “find cellphone numbers and communicate more effectively with voters who are no longer reachable via land lines.”

DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell declined comment, and it’s unclear to what extent the DNC is employing the demographic-tracking services these companies offer to benefit itself or the Obama campaign.

For its part, the Republican National Committee in January spent $407,000 on data services from a dozen different corporate vendors.

The RNC uses “industry best standards” to secure personal data, “and we work with our vendors to use industry best standards, too,” spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said.

This includes allowing people to opt out of receiving RNC email and phone messages and not disseminating unsolicited text messages, Kukowski said, adding that the committee never uses Social Security numbers or personal financial information to reach prospective supporters.

As RNC uses “more and more mediums” for political messaging, “we’ll continue to carefully review our practices,” she said.

And as the digital privacy landscape continues to shift for corporations and politicians alike, it’s Obama who’s seeking stability.

His Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, a nonbinding document his administration wants to use as the foundation for federal legislation or regulatory action, offers up seven broad principals for the government to address in the name of protecting personal data in commercial contexts.

They include individual control of personal data, transparency, respect for the context in which data is collected, security, accuracy, focused collection and accountability by data collectors. The individual control provision states that consumers should have the right to “exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it.”

The president also urged companies such as Google and Facebook, which the Federal Trade Commission last year blasted for misleading people about how it collects data on them, to work with online advertisers and privacy advocates to create new industry standards for personal data use.

Said Obama in the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights’ introduction: “One thing should be clear, even though we live in a world in which we share personal information more freely than in the past, we must reject the conclusion that privacy is an outmoded value. It has been at the heart of our democracy from its inception, and we need it now more than ever.”

Also at the heart of the nation’s democracy is political speech and communication, which receives greater legal protection than commercial speech.

The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, if enacted as written, wouldn’t apply to political campaigns.

Obama for America tells POLITICO that the campaign itself is nonetheless adhering to the bill’s principles and intends to work with its vendors and contractors, which are on the frontlines of its political messaging and data collection, to do the same. It did not provide a timeline for how long it may take vendors and contractors to do so.

In the meantime, politicians who want to find you will likely be able to do so whether you like it or not.

“When you’re running a billion-dollar campaign, you can sit around and say, ‘What’s the coolest thing we can do to get our message out?’” Democratic political strategist Jason Stanford said. “And since people have so many filters up, and there’s so many messages already out there, you have to use whatever you can to find any crack in that tent that you can so you reach them.”