Wired’s Threat level has an interesting post on a story by VanityFair on Aristotle, a political data mining company. The title is “Voter Privacy Is Gone — Get Over It”, but I think that is slightly misleading.

A campaign or other entity could certainly take advantage of (abuse) the information provided by Aristotle. However, the data only shows which way you are likely to vote, not necessarily that you will vote that way. Being allowed to vote (which is what this data is abused to determine) is only half the equation. You also need to be protected from being forced to vote differently than you otherwise would.

I see a problem, but I don’t see how Aristotle or any political data mining company is contributing to it per se. Any entity, private or political, with enough resources is going to be capable of gathering this data. Whether that should be regulated/illegal or not is another matter entirely. I will say that their false claims of buyer verification in the article do not inspire confidence…

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.