Video of Who Do Political Parties Think We Are?

What is this?

This is an automated tool to help you access your data rights. You have a right under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to request the personal data held about you by data controllers.

Built by Open Rights Group and MoreOnion, this tool will send subject access requests to political parties across the United Kingdom (Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland).

Once you have used the tool to send data requests, parties will be obliged by law to respond to you.

What do I need to use this tool?

All you need is a photo ID that proves your identity and lists your current voting address.

A driving licence will suffice if the address is your current voting address. If the address does not match, you'll need to add a second document with your current voting address. This could be a utility bill, council tax bill or a bank statement from the last 3 months.

How do I use the tool?

Use the form on this page to enter your name and address. Then attach the necessary ID documentation when prompted. This is easy to do with your phone or laptop.

What will the tool do with my personal data?

The documents you attach for proof of identity and address will be sent to the political parties listed in the form once you choose your country and immediately deleted by Open Rights Group and MoreOnion when you send the request.

Political parties should also delete your ID documents from their systems once they have complied with your data request.

If you agree to stay in touch with Open Rights Group on this campaign and others, your name, email address and postcode will be held by Open Rights Group for that purpose. You can contact Open Rights Group at any time to ask for this data to be deleted.

What will happen after I send the request?

You should receive an automatic reply from each of the parties acknowledging receipt of your request.

You will also receive a confirmation email from Open Rights Group.

Parties have 30 days to comply with the request and provide the personal data that they hold about you. They can ask for a further two months to send you the data. However they need to inform you that they intend to do this.

If you opt-in to future emails from Open Rights Group, we will check in with you after 30 days to confirm whether you have received a response. If not, we can help you follow up. We'll also check to see whether you would like to share your results with us to aid our research.

Who will receive my subject access request?

Your request will be automatically sent to every political party you can vote for in your country that has a sitting elected representative in a national or regional parliament or assembly.

This means parties represented in the House of Commons, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and Northern Irish Assembly.

Once you select your country, you will see a list of all the parties that will receive your request.

Can I send the request only to specific parties?

This tool automatically sends your request to all parties as noted above. You cannot select only some parties to contact.

The aim of you sending this request is to contribute to Open Rights Group's research understanding how all UK political parties use personal data for campaigning and other purposes. To gain the necessary information to analyse this properly, we need to gather data from all parties across all parts of the UK. It would not be helpful to our research to gather data selectively so we have not allowed for the tool to do this.

If you wish to ask specific parties for your data, please visit the Information Commissioner’s Office website, where you will find guidance on how to construct direct subject access requests. You should be able to find the contact details for where to direct requests on each political party website.