VANCOUVER—Ordinary British Columbians’ personal information is being improperly “scraped” by political parties, compiled into demographic databases and handed to social-media giants to harvest the data of even more people.

Efforts to understand party voters can be legitimate, B.C.’s privacy commissioner told StarMetro on Wednesday, but it’s happening without our consent or permission — and that is illegal under provincial law.

“Political parties collect a lot of information about voters in the province, which is not surprising,” Michael McEvoy said in a phone interview Wednesday. “Parties are not allowed to collect whatever they want on people.”

He listed examples he documented, including doorstep canvassers recording any religious symbols they spotted in people’s homes as well as homeowners’ perceived ethnicity. He said parties are also handing bulk email addresses to Facebook so the company can find demographic patterns — and provide them with a larger list of people with similar profiles.

“Essentially, they have to have the consent of people they’re collecting information from,” said McEvoy. “You need to ask permission. That’s the basis of the law.”

McEvoy’s 45-page report, titled “Full Disclosure: Political parties, campaign data, and voter consent,” comes nearly five months after his federal counterpart warned that “information about our political views is highly sensitive, and it’s clearly unacceptable that federal and provincial parties are not subject to privacy laws.”

In B.C., however, parties must heed the province’s information protection legislation. As B.C.’s watchdog, McEvoy has the power to launch investigations into alleged violations and recommend charges.

Colin Bennett is a University of Victoria political scientist who has studied parties’ data use at both the federal and provincial levels. He said the report is just “the first step” toward Canada joining a “global conversation” about personal data breaches, documented in the British referendum to leave the European Union — Brexit — and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

“Look, political parties need personal data and they have an important role in our democracy,” said Bennett, who has authored several studies on party data use. “But they should only be collecting that information with the consent of the individual.”

He said his research meant few of McEvoy’s allegations, including recording ethnic and religious data by looking in people’s houses, comes as much of a surprise.

“Quite often in the frenzy of an election campaign, the inclination is to just grab as much information as possible about the voter and get it into the database,” Bennett said. “But you’re not supposed to be fishing around for other information on the doorstep, and it’s the same with telephone polling.

“There has to be better training of volunteers. These practices develop because one party does it, and the other party follows because they think they’re going to be losing out if they don’t. We’ve got to reverse that trend.

“It really shouldn’t be controversial. It’s in their interests, because it will build trust among voters and allow us to prevent the kind of abuses we’ve seen south of the border and in relation to Brexit.”

McEvoy revealed to StarMetro that exactly one year before the release of his latest report — prior to his appointment as the province’s privacy czar — he was meeting in London, U.K. with former Victoria, B.C. resident turned data whistleblower Christopher Wylie.

McEvoy, then the deputy B.C. commissioner, was temporarily transferred to the U.K. to spearhead the British privacy commissioner’s investigation into illegal data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica during the Brexit campaign, as revealed by Wylie.

“A year ago today I was literally in a room with him while he was making his disclosure to the regulator in London,” McEvoy said.

McEvoy’s explosive probe across the Atlantic offered him lessons he brought to bear in the months his office probed B.C. parties’ handling of data.

“Investigating political parties over there was of some assistance here because there were some similarities between the two (countries) and the questions to ask,” he said. “(U.K.) voters were being psychologically profiled by an organization.

“The good news is that’s not happening here. But parties are nonetheless using other means and analytic tools to predict how someone feels … It’s fair to say nobody want to see some of those things washing up on our shores.”

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McEvoy is giving all parties six months to fix problems he identified in how each misuses data. He said he prefers to encourage best practices before he has to resort to criminal proceedings.

“I think that’s the sense of it, yes. This report wasn’t (done) as a formal inquiry; it was an investigation,” he said. “There are no orders made here, though I do have the authority to do that.

“At the end of the day, after a more formal process, I can make an order. But I hope that is not necessary.”

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