In the US, lax regulation around personal data has allowed political campaigns to track voters and their ideological leanings. The UK could follow this by unwinding current EU-modelled safeguards
Donald Trump uses nativist anger to put his government beyond empirical argument. His presidency has eroded the norms of political conflict. He poses an ever-present danger to democracy. This November, Mr Trump is up for re-election. His effort is built to an alarming degree on exploiting the United States’s lack of privacy safeguards around voting intention.
Digital campaigning in the US is a largely unregulated field with little oversight of the ways in which voters are targeted or manipulated. Politicians in the US want to target specific voters to increase their base’s turnout, convert the undecided and suppress their opponent’s support. The evidence suggests that Trump’s campaign rests on a data-gathering juggernaut that wants “to know who [voters] are and how [they] think”.
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Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
