21 May 2024

This November, your data privacy will be on the ballot, too

NICKY WATSON

This fall, voters will be contemplating a risky decision — and I’m not referring to the presidential candidates. I am talking about the real issue this election season: protecting voter data privacy.

With the Cambridge Analytica scandal still in recent memory, voters are concerned about the security of their personal information online. Ahead of this year’s election, which is happening in tandem with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), voters must be aware that there are heightened risks to the security of their personal information. There are also steps that businesses can and should take to ensure they are protecting customer data from bad actors.

During election seasons of years past, inboxes got fuller, campaign cold-calls ticked up and mass texts exploded. We all know this to be true. It’s an age-old challenge that dates back to before the AI boom.

Just think back to the November 2022 primary season. The Federal Election Commission approved a request from Google that allowed political senders to bypass spam filters on their way to Gmail inboxes. Essentially, a candidate, party, or political action committee could apply for the pilot program and, as long as its emails didn’t contain content prohibited by Gmail’s terms of service (phishing, malware, illegal content), they were accepted into the program.

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