Start-up offers marketing based on voter data: Why EC should be worried

In a move that is likely to raise issues of voter data privacy, Modak Analytics-a Hyderabad-based data analytics start-up- has said that it is building India’s first Big Data-based Electoral Data Repository system, according to a report on PTI. You can check out a sample of how this big data works here. The PDF shows how the company plans to use data from the Election Commission website to offer data on each constituency such as gender break-up, percentage of Muslim population, Dalit population, etc. According to Modak, the company has made an innovation by applying Big Data analytics for the first time on such a massive scale. It says that data analytics will help parties or candidates raise funds, design tailor-made communication targetted at select groups of voters, rework advertisements and create detailed models for voter engagement in battleground states. The idea is to use the data about a particular constituency and make a specific, targeted campaign. [caption id=“attachment_1518569” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational Image - Reuters[/caption] Milind Chitgupakar, Chief Analytics Officer of Modak Analytics, told PTI the exercise (creation of the repository) is massive, involving 81.4 crore voters in India, the largest such number in the world. “Obama’s 2008 campaign brought the use of Social Media and the 2012 (campaign) the use of Big Data to forefront. 2014 Indian elections have gone one step further and used both Social Media and Big Data….The just-concluded elections registered two irreversible trends… a very large young voter base and advances in technology,” Chitgupakar told PTI. Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Modak Aarti Joshi told TechGoss , “Data from multiple sources like Census, Economic and Social surveys were mapped to polling booths. Simultaneously, external and propriety data sources had to be fused with individual voters’ data. Because of this complex nature, no big IT company ever ventured into this.” The idea of using voter data for big data analytics sounds like a dream come true for IT companies but the question of the privacy of voters is one that appears to have been completely ignored. As this piece in MediaNama points out, “While micro-targeting sounds good on paper from a marketing perspective, we need to remember that they have this information without the consent of the voter.” The article also raises some important questions: “Does Modak have the right to use the information scraped from the EC website to offer such services to political parties? What is the guarantee that political parties will micro-target audiences using the data only for good purposes?” The Election Commission had started putting voter data on its various websites as part of an attempt to make it easier for users to find their respective polling booth. The fact that such data can be scraped from the EC website and used for micro-targeting of voters is worrisome. It also highlights the need for India to have better laws ensuring that user data, especially one as sensitive as voter data, is not scraped and used for marketing purposes only because a company finds it is able to do so. The Election Commission too can’t escape the blame on this issue. As the piece in MediaNama asks, “Shouldn’t the Election Commission have looked at privacy issues before making this data so freely available online?” It is perhaps time the EC reviews how it is negotiating with technology, and starts taking the issue of user privacy more seriously.