A new report from the non-profit group The Internet Society raises questions about what websites for 2020 Presidential candidates are doing with your data and personal information.
In an Online Trust Audit of the 2020 presidential campaign websites, researchers concluded "Overall, we found that 2020 U.S. Presidential campaigns have strong site security, reasonable consumer protection, and poor privacy statements that allow free sharing of data."
Privacy statements disclose what a given website, which asks for information like your name, address, or email address, will do with that data once submitted.
According to the Internet Society audit, "The published privacy statements vary significantly, from stating that they disallow any sharing to language effectively enabling campaigns to share personal information broadly with any third party."
Jeff Wilbur, with the Internet Society, said sites with vague privacy statements, or no privacy statements, provide little to no guidelines for what they'll do with your personal information after they get their hands on it.
"There were four campaigns that had no privacy statement at all. That's bad," Wilbur said. "But even those that did, the language they had regarding how they would share data was, in our opinion, very loose. I would say it allows them to pretty much share data with anyone."
"We were looking for language along the lines of, 'We don't sell, rent or share your data, but if we do share it with third parties, it's for these certain reasons and we hold them to the same accountability as ourselves,'" Wilbur said.
"Instead, we found that for most of the campaigns, they said, 'We'll share data with like-minded organizations.' That could be anyone, and there were no statements about holding those third parties accountable for anything," Wilbur added.
Wilbur said the purpose of the audit was not to pick on political campaigns and their websites, but to provide an objective look at how/when campaigns might share your data.
WIlbur noted some of those impacted may be okay with the data sharing, but he wants people to know what they're signing up for.
"These days, especially, there's a lot of sensitivity to that," Wilbur said. "The more data gets shared, the more places it exists to be reached or abused in some other way."
The audit concluded, "Disclosing that data may be shared with 'like-minded' organizations may be a common practice for campaigns, but is still concerning in light of the depth of demographic and financial information being collected."
