Thread by @LFDodds

Boris is using it. Farage is using it. Macron used it. Even the People’s Vote used it. But should you be worried about it?

I took a deep dive into NationBuilder, a powerful data-gathering & voter management system which has won elections across the world

telegraph.co.uk/technology/201…

Not many know what NationBuilder is or what it can do, and campaigns are shy about it. But it could not be described as “shadowy”, because when we got in touch to ask how it works, @ToniCowanBrown jumped on Zoom and talked me through its methods in great detail - for 90 mins!

To say nothing of the very numerous email follow-up questions.

I'm emphasising this because it's honestly quite rare for California tech executives – let alone political targeting firms and data marketing firms – to be wiling to do that. So, props.

What I found was equal parts fascinating, reassuring and worrying.

NB works by unifying different sources of data on supporters and "prospects" to build one unified profile, which campaigners can use to track their interests and behaviour and then target with email blasts.

Some of those sources are uncontroversial: if you sign an online petition or donate to a campaign that uses NB, that'll be remembered. Others are dicier: campaigners upload their own data, and who knows where they got that? (Surely nobody would ever get it in unscrupulous ways)

The most contentious source is social media. NationBuilder allows its customers to automatically harvest all kinds of data - from names to profile pictures to locations to the words in your Twitter bio - from your social media accounts, which then gets attached to your profile.

One method is logging the details of everyone who interacts with a customer's FB page or Twitter account via those sites' APIs.

Another is by sending email addresses to a third party vendor, which ties them to soc med profiles... somehow. (NB wont say how; it might be scraping)

What does this look like?

Let's say you're a nurse and you retweet the Labour party one time. Labour can use NB to scan your Twitter bio and location, tie it to your email address and then send you emails about saving your local hospital.

You might not know this happened!

(An important caveat is that Labour would have to have your email address already. But maybe you signed a petition that one time, several years ago...)

Think about what it could do with your LinkedIn page!

All of this is public information, of course. If your account is private, NB won't scan it.

But the ICO has said it is concerned about this kind of data-gathering, questioning whether users are truly aware of it or have consented. It's already been banned in France.

"If you've got a club card, Tesco don't know you're a Telegraph journalist, but... NationBuilder does," @mjrharris told me. "I can hide from Tesco that I'm the chief executive of @89up, but NationBuilder tells whoever I sign a petition with that that's what I do."

@mjrharris @89up Cowan-Brown forthrightly agreed that this capability is "scary" and will be "surprising" to many people. Her defence was that politicians have been doing this for years with human interns, and automating it will democratise it, giving a boost to underdog campaigns with less £££.

Here's another interesting thing: NationBuilder absolutely refuses (at least for now) to turn down customers due to their politics.

I'm not kidding. I asked whether the company would do its full service to a neo-Nazi party led by David Duke.

Answer: yep. It sucks, but yep.

To be clear, that would mean not only NB taking money from Cyber Hitler or whoever, but employees actively giving him tech support.

Yet NB is not shy about this! Its reasoning is worth reading in full, but here's part - stands in total contrast to the stances of most tech firms

Just to clarify, this is a hypothetical example, intended only to illustrate how this stuff could work - Labour did not tell me whether or not they used NB, but @jankowski_uk says they stopped in 2017

https://twitter.com/LFDodds/status/1170448396454227968

There is so much more in the article, including Boris's data-guzzling and NB's policy on data brokers.

I hope it helps you feel in control of your own data - but honestly, my takeaway is that no one person can be expected to anticipate these methods.

telegraph.co.uk/technology/201…

PS: I will continue to research political technology, so if you have any tips on who is using what, and what kind of data our politicians are snaffling and sorting, my DMs are always open, and you can ask my number for Signal there... 👀