This Thursday (1 May 2025), voters will go to the polls in 1,641 council seats across 24 local authorities. You may have spoken to a canvasser, filled out a political survey, or received campaign leaflets — but have you ever stopped to wonder how political parties know where to find you, how likely you are to vote, or even what you care about?

How Political Parties use your data

Behind the scenes, political parties are using sophisticated data systems to profile, segment, and target voters — and many people have little to no idea this is happening.

Five years ago, Open Rights Group published a report called What Do They Know? revealing how political parties were building detailed databases of voter information. In the run-up to last year’s General Election, we revisited this issue — and what we found was even more troubling.

We invited supporters to submit subject access requests (SARs) to political parties, allowing individuals to see what data parties held on them. We have complied a CSV full of some of the data fields we learned about.

This time, we also provided new tools to help people opt out of automated profiling and algorithmic decision-making. In parallel, we carried out a technical audit of canvassing apps used by major parties and published the results in our report, Moral Hazard: Voter Data Privacy and Politics in Election Canvassing Apps.

Here are four lessons we’ve learned.

ONE
Credit agency Experian is embedded in Labour’s voter targeting infrastructure

We uncovered an uncomfortably close relationship between the Labour Party and Experian, a credit referencing agency best known for scoring people’s creditworthiness.

Experian plays a role in hosting or developing key parts of Labour’s canvassing database. Labour’s privacy policy admits that the party collects “demographic data about you from our commercial supplier (Experian),” but provides little detail about the nature of this data or how it’s used.

Subject access requests suggest that Experian’s Mosaic data is used to algorithmically score voters — including, worryingly, assigning a score for a person’s likelihood of being at home during the day.

Credit reference agencies like Experian have extraordinary powers to harvest personal data. Their involvement in electoral profiling raises serious questions about data separation and accountability.

We believe the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) should investigate how data flows between Experian and political parties, and whether such relationships breach the principles of data protection law.

TWO
Political parties are still failing to respect people’s data rights

No political party performed well in handling data access or opt-out requests.

• The Conservatives, though relatively quick to respond, treated requests to opt out of profiling as if they were simply requests to stop receiving marketing emails.

• We had reports from members that the Liberal Democrats claimed they were too busy during the election to respond to some SARs.

• Labour introduced bureaucratic hurdles, questioning the validity of requests submitted through third-party tools — ironically, despite most email addresses also being third-party services.

• Reform UK failed to respond at all, prompting the Good Law Project to take legal action against them.

This isn’t about pointing fingers at one party over another — it’s a systemic failure across the political spectrum. Established parties like Labour and the Conservatives are just as culpable as newer entrants like Reform UK or the Workers Party of Britain. The underlying problem is that compliance isn’t prioritised in political campaigning — funding and staffing go to ads and outreach, not rights and transparency.

Most parties offer some ability to opt out of direct marketing, but none are prepared to honour opt-outs from automated profiling. That’s concerning, because some voters may want to hear from candidates — but not be profiled or scored based on commercially available data.

If political parties want to earn the trust of privacy-conscious voters, they need to take these rights seriously.

THREE
Profiling by race has declined — but class-based targeting remains widespread

When we first looked at voter profiling in the late 2010s, it wasn’t unusual to find parties making assumptions about race, religion, and ethnicity. The Liberal Democrats analysed surnames to predict ethnic origin. Labour used Experian’s “Mosaic Origins” data field. The Conservatives had a “Mysticism” field to guess someone’s religion.

Our most recent SAR data shows fewer signs of this kind of profiling — a welcome shift. But class-based targeting remains widespread. However the Conservatives were still using a ‘mother tongue’ field which could be used as a proxy for race and cultural profiling.

Voters are still being profiled based on wealth and income indicators, often sourced from third-party commercial datasets. Parties routinely use marked registers — which show who has voted in past elections — to estimate a person’s likelihood to vote.

Together, these tools can lead to a troubling outcome: if parties believe certain people are unlikely to vote, they’re less likely to contact them. And those people, in turn, become even more disengaged.

It creates a vicious cycle of disenfranchisement — especially for those from lower-income or precarious backgrounds.

The use of credit data (again, often via Experian) can exacerbate these issues, as debt history and postcode data are used to profile voting behaviour.

Politicians should remember: ignoring voters who don’t vote might backfire — especially when a new party comes along with a message that resonates with those left out.

FOUR
Canvassing apps: security flaws and lack of transparency

Our Moral Hazard report revealed major privacy and security concerns in the canvassing apps used by political parties:

• Labour’s web-based Reach, Doorstep and Contact Creator apps were found to be integrated with infrastructure owned by Experian. It’s unclear how data was shared and processed between the two entities.

• Static Application Security Testing analysis of the Liberal Democrats’ MiniVan App found it was deployed on infrastructure with a history of known vulnerabilities.

• The Conservatives’ Share2Win app raised privacy concerns including potential location tracking.

• All parties appear to be reliant on international commercial entities to run key parts of their digital campaigning infrastructure.

The lack of transparency over these tools — and how data is being stored, shared, or secured — raises serious questions about voter privacy and legality. We believe the ICO must investigate these tools as part of a broader inquiry into the data ecosystems underpinning modern campaigning.

Time for Political Data Reform

Our investigations show that voter data rights are still not being respected — by any political party.

Political parties collect vast amounts of personal data to drive increasingly precise and opaque targeting. But the systems they use are poorly regulated, frequently intrusive, and not subject to meaningful oversight.

If democracy is to be fair, voters must have the right to understand, challenge, and opt out of how they’re being profiled. We need:

• Stronger enforcement by the ICO.

• Greater transparency from political parties.

• Tools and rights that put power back in the hands of voters.

• Funding for parties to get compliance issues right.

As voters head the polls in local elections, we urge parties to clean up their data practices — and we urge voters to ask: What do they know about me? And what are they doing with it?

ACCESS WHAT INFORMATION POLITICAL PARTIES HAVE ABOUT YOU

Use our tool to find out what data political parties hold about you
Take action

Voter Data Privacy and Politics in Election Canvassing Apps

Read ORG’s report into canvassing apps used by UK Political Parties
Find out more

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Joe and James discuss testimony by whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She was formerly Facebook/Meta’s global public policy director.

youtube.com/embed/4jtmNP3uZCQ?…

Sign up to our newsletter to get notified of new events or volunteer. Join us on:

• Mastodon;
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Some links we mentioned:

• Ex-Facebook employee to tell Congress the company undermined U.S. national security;
• C-SPAN: Meta Whistleblower Testifies on Facebook Practices;
• FULL HEARING: Facebook Whistleblower Testifies Before Senate Judiciary Committee.

Image Credit: C-SPAN

masspirates.org/blog/2025/04/2…

Our next member meeting is Sunday, May 4th. We start at 8pm and will end once our agenda is complete or 9pm, whichever comes sooner.

To participate:

• go to communitybridge.com/bbb-room/m…;
• enter your name;
• enter the access code listed on the page;
• click the Join button.

Summaries of the meetings and agendas are at our wiki. You can view the 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022 meeting recordings.

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Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly rescinded her predecessor’s policy restricting federal prosecutors from forcing journalists to reveal their sources. Her memo follows news that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asked the Department of Justice to investigate recent leaks to reporters.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said:

“Every Democrat who put the PRESS Act on the back burner when they had the opportunity to pass a bipartisan bill codifying journalist-source confidentiality should be ashamed. Everyone predicted this would happen in a second Trump administration, yet politicians in a position to prevent it prioritized empty rhetoric over putting up a meaningful fight.

Because of them, a president who threatens journalists with prison rape for protecting their sources and says reporting critically on his administration should be illegal can and almost certainly will abuse the legal system to investigate and prosecute his critics and the journalists they talk to.”

The PRESS Act, which would have prohibited the government from compelling journalists to burn sources except in life-or-death emergencies, twice passed the House unanimously.

It had bipartisan support in the Senate, including from Republican co-sponsors Sen. Mike Lee and Sen. Lindsey Graham. It was endorsed by everyone from the New York Times editorial board to former Fox News journalist Catherine Herridge.

Yet it spent months stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite the best efforts of Lee and co-sponsor Sen. Ron Wyden to move it forward. Then, President Donald Trump was elected and instructed Republicans to kill the bill in a Truth Social post.

The Biden administration also deserves blame, not only for failing to vocally support the PRESS Act but for the bogus criminal theories it pursued against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Florida journalist Tim Burke under the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, respectively. Biden’s validation of those theories provides Trump with significant leverage against journalists who publish secrets provided by sources.

The only good news is that those prosecutions – as well as Trump and others’ insistence that routine journalism should be illegal – opens a door for journalists who are subpoenaed to invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. That would effectively dare Trump’s administration to grant immunity to reporters he calls “enemies of the people.”

freedom.press/issues/trump-doj…

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Here’s what we’re focused on this week, as officials across America continue their attacks on the free press.

Administration must release memos on abduction of op-ed writer

Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims the authority to unilaterally declare students who protest the Israel-Gaza war antisemites and terrorism supporters in order to kick them out of the country.

So when even Rubio’s State Department doubts the government has grounds to deport a student — especially an anti-war student from the Middle East — the administration’s position must be exceptionally weak. In the case of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, it is. According to The Washington Post, internal government memos admit that the only “evidence” against her was her co-authoring an op-ed criticizing the war and that, to state the obvious, this evidence is legally insufficient to justify deportation.

The administration needs to make these memos public. Read more here.

Journalist targeted by Trump 1.0 discusses Trump 2.0

When The Associated Press didn’t bow to President Donald Trump’s demand to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” he barred the news service from events in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. And when a judge deemed that decision unconstitutional, he spiked the permanent press pool slot for wire services entirely.

This (un)constitutional experiment started in his first term, when he revoked the credentials of individual journalists he disliked, including Brian Karem, a former White House correspondent who covered Trump for Playboy.

Karem spoke about that experience and today’s press restrictions in a webinar hosted by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) last week. He was joined by Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser at FPF, and Stephanie Sugars, who regularly reports on issues of press access to the White House as senior reporter for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of FPF. You can watch and read about the conversation here.

Investigating Medicaid fraud through public records

Our series on local journalists who use public-records-based reporting to make a difference continues with a profile of Hannah Bassett, who helped expose a deadly Medicaid fraud scheme targeting Native American communities in Arizona.

“In Arizona, the public records statute allows for the state agencies to claim an exemption if a record is in the state’s interest to withhold,” Bassett explained. “It’s understandable that some information coming out might not be in an agency’s interest, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the public’s interest.”

Read more about Bassett and her reporting here.

Streisand wouldn’t let the U.S. government rain on Ellsberg’s parade

Happy birthday to Barbra Streisand, whose 1973 fundraiser kept our co-founder Daniel Ellsberg’s legal fight alive long enough for him to win.

“Indirectly, that ability to keep the trial going and his case getting kicked led to the whole uncovering of the Watergate scandal, which led to the downfall of Nixon, which led to him not dropping nuclear weapons on Vietnam,” documentarian Paul Jay told the Hollywood Reporter after Ellsberg died in 2023.

She kept Ellsberg out of jail for leaking the Pentagon Papers; now we’re continuing his fight to defend whistleblowers.

What we’re reading

Keep Texas free speech strong. Leave anti-SLAPP laws alone (Houston Chronicle). Two bills before the Texas Legislature would undermine critical protections against frivolous lawsuits by the powerful to censor their critics. Lawmakers need to listen to the bipartisan backlash and reject the bills.

Judge declines AP challenge to new White House press pool policy, but says time will tell whether wire service still gets “second class treatment” (Deadline). Any judge willing to put blinders on to presume this administration is acting in “good faith” is unfit for this moment, and probably any moment. The one thing the administration has been transparent about is its bad-faith motives for retaliating against the Associated Press.

Police officers who joined Jan. 6 rally ask Supreme Court for anonymity (The Washington Post). It sounds like the requester could just copy the officers’ brief on why their identities shouldn’t be disclosed and recaption it as a brief on why their identities should be disclosed. The First Amendment does not protect public officials from being embarrassed by their unpopular opinions.

FCC chair threatens Comcast licenses for alleged ‘news distortion’ (U.S. Press Freedom Tracker). Legally speaking, the idea of punishing reporting critical of the president’s policies as outside the “public interest” is laughable. But unfortunately we have an FCC chair who traded in his law books for a Trump lapel pin.

As in DC, a fight breaks out in Washington state over who gets access to lawmakers (Investigate West). We told Investigate West that “Now that there are so many independent journalists out there, politicians are taking it upon themselves to be the judge of who is and isn’t a journalist.”

Here’s how to share sensitive leaks with the press.

freedom.press/issues/release-s…

Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims the authority to unilaterally declare students who protest the Israel-Gaza war antisemites and terrorism supporters in order to kick them out of the country.

So when even Rubio’s State Department doubts the government has grounds to deport a student — especially an anti-war student from the Middle East — the administration’s position must be exceptionally weak. In the case of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, it is. The only known “evidence” against her was her co-authoring an op-ed criticizing the war and calling for Tufts to divest from Israeli investments.

According to The Washington Post, the department issued a memo reaching one of the most obvious conclusions in the history of memos – that the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that Öztürk acted “in support of Hamas,” and therefore could be thrown out of the country, is baseless.

Yet the public hasn’t seen that key document about Öztürk, who was abducted by plainclothes federal agents in March and is currently in an immigration jail in Louisiana. The Post’s source was only able to “describe” the memo’s content to journalists.

Nor has the public seen another memo, also reported by the Post, from DHS official Andre Watson to senior State Department official John Armstrong, accusing Öztürk of “anti-Israel activism” with “adverse policy consequences for the United States.” Tellingly, the only example provided by Watson, according to the Post, was the aforementioned op-ed.

These two documents expose the frivolousness of the administration’s case against Öztürk, which is central to one of the most important public debates in America, now and possibly ever. And it’s alarming that whether the government can incarcerate and expel non-citizens (and maybe citizens) who express ideas it doesn’t like qualifies as a “debate” these days.

Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have shot down the administration’s due process-free deportation practices. Some of President Donald Trump’s closest supporters, both in Congress and popular culture, are breaking from his rhetoric on this issue, recognizing the obvious dangers of persecuting nonviolent anti-war speech. Journalists everywhere are self-censoring and pulling stories out of fear of being thrown in jail cells from Louisiana to El Salvador.

A country that expels op-ed writers and hides government records about why simply does not have freedom of the press.

Last week, Federal Communications Commission Chair and shameless Trump lapdog Brendan Carr (the guy wears a golden bust of Trump as a lapel pin) threatened to investigate news outlets that doubt the administration’s false narratives or don’t air all of its spin sessions. Predictably, a Trump-aligned organization filed an FCC complaint echoing Carr’s nonsense.

All that is to say, it’s a big deal that even the State Department knows the administration is wrong. The existence and substance of the two memos have already been reported, so the cat is out of the bag — there is no basis for secrecy. There never was. And there is little risk of tainting a future jury pool — Öztürk can only dream of that kind of due process.

In any event, now that the memos have been disclosed, it’s hard to argue that the public is better off with a potentially incomplete news report than with the entire documents. But this is an administration that believes questioning its infallibility is contrary to the “public interest.”

That’s not how officials who are confident in the accuracy of their facts and the soundness of their legal arguments behave. The administration needs to be prepared to defend its (indefensible) views on free expression, not hide from them. If it claims the First Amendment tolerates throwing people out of the country for using news ink to express political beliefs shared by millions, it needs to be transparent, including about why it overruled internal dissent.

We’ve filed Freedom of Information Act requests for both memos. We know the administration is likely to deny those requests, and we’re prepared to put up a fight there and anywhere else we see an opportunity to force some transparency out of this lawless administration.

As a press freedom organization, there’s no other option. A country that expels op-ed writers and hides government records about why simply does not have freedom of the press.

freedom.press/issues/administr…

This is the second in a series of profiles of independent journalists who use public records to hold local governments accountable. The first, about Lisa Pickoff-White of the California Reporting Project, is available here.

When enterprise and investigative reporter Hannah Bassett arrived in Arizona to report for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, she was looking forward to helping the public understand some of the statewide health disparities affecting local communities through her stories. But just a few weeks into her beat, Bassett’s reporting revealed one of the largest Medicaid fraud campaigns in modern U.S. history.

Bassett’s story investigated a deadly scheme created by behavioral health providers who fraudulently billed Arizona’s Medicaid agency for services never provided. The scheme targeted Native American individuals by exploiting a Medicaid plan for which only American Indians and Alaska Natives are eligible, interrupting services and making health care and sober living homes inaccessible, with tragic results.

“It was apparent pretty early on that there was going to be a lot of unprecedented elements to this, in terms of what the public records showed,” said Bassett. “They showed there were signs early on that staff noticed and tried to report up escalating claims, which was sort of a canary in the coal mine, and that something wasn’t working.”

Requesting and collecting public records for Bassett’s story was a team effort. Bassett and her colleagues had to refine and amend multiple requests to get a response from the government. Eventually, Bassett said it felt like the Medicaid agency was dragging its feet, so she enlisted the help of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to send a demand letter and ultimately obtain records that pieced together a timeline.

“It’s understandable that some information coming out might not be in an agency’s interest, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the public’s interest.”

Hannah Bassett

“In Arizona, the public records statute allows for the state agencies to claim an exemption if a record is in the state’s interest to withhold,” Bassett said. “It’s understandable that some information coming out might not be in an agency’s interest, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the public’s interest.”

Investigative reporting isn’t just about public records — it’s about trust. To build that trust among the Native communities she was covering, Bassett shadowed local Indigenous advocates in their outreach to individuals facing housing and food insecurity and leaned on her reporting partner, Mary Hudetz, who provided an essential perspective as an Indigenous person herself. Weaving Hudetz’s public records reporting on the death toll in these communities with the internal agency records Bassett obtained helped humanize and ground the story for readers.

“If it were just my line of reporting, that would have been really dry and hard for people to latch on to,” Bassett said. “Ultimately, being able to come out with that story that felt very complete with both sides and having stuck on the story long enough to get those records felt like a real win.”

Bassett’s interest in journalism piqued after a narrative and documentary class her senior year of college. She ultimately decided to pursue a reporting career and received her master’s degree from Stanford University’s journalism program, which puts emphasis on using data to tell stories.

“I was trying to find that balance of writing about issues that I felt were in the public’s interest, trying to break down complex policy matters to help the public understand what that meant on a more individual or community level,” Bassett said. “I had experience using public records requests already, and knowing how to use some programming languages and data analysis skills was going to help me know what to do with big sets of government data that I might get from an agency.”

Bassett is now based in Burlington, Vermont, where she covers the state legislature for an alternative, independent newspaper, Seven Days.

freedom.press/issues/investiga…

When The Associated Press didn’t bow to President Donald Trump’s demand to refer to the Gulf of Mexico solely as the “Gulf of America,” he barred the news service from events in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. And when a judge determined that Trump’s decision to do so was unconstitutional, he spiked the permanent press pool slot for wire services entirely.

These decisions to shun newsrooms may sound like the product of a tantrum — and they are — but there is also a pattern at play: Trump is testing the limits of the First Amendment.

This (un)constitutional experiment started in his first term, when he revoked the credentials of individual journalists he disliked. One of them was Brian Karem, a former White House correspondent who covered Trump for Playboy.

Karem spoke about that experience and today’s press restrictions in a webinar hosted by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) on April 16, 2025. He was joined by Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser at FPF, and Stephanie Sugars, who regularly reports on issues of press access to the White House as senior reporter for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of FPF.

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Karem, who successfully sued the Trump administration three separate times to get his press pass reinstated, emphasized that Trump’s denial of access to the AP is also a broader attack on wire services like Reuters and Bloomberg. Cash-strapped local newsrooms often rely on wire reporting to fill pages and inform readers, which is much harder to do when those services are sidelined.

“The whole point of this is to limit those who will ask questions that Donald Trump doesn't want to answer,” Karem said during the webinar. “The effect, of course, for people across the country, is a slanted view of the news.”

In cherry-picking who can cover him, Trump is restricting access to the White House to only those willing to stoop to his demands, Sugars said.

“It's alarming when you see all of these things in conjunction with each other and just how effectively this administration is taking steps to ensure that the only message that is getting out is one that they approve of,” she said.

The consequences are grave, including less-experienced journalists in the press room and fewer outlets reporting on the administration with the required scrutiny, Karem said. That enables Trump to hide more from the American public, which is therefore less equipped to hold him accountable.

“Donald Trump is asking, ‘Who are you with? What company are you with?’ because he wants to know so he can come back and say, ‘Oh, I like you.’” Karem said. “He has turned himself into a dictator with sycophants asking him questions.”

Trump’s effort to exert control over the press extends to major networks, too, Sugars said. Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has opened investigations into outlets including NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, and NBC, and the Trump administration recently gutted the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America.

“It's been a bit of an onslaught and coming from a lot of different angles, from within the White House, the Trump administration, and his allies more generally in Congress,” Sugars said.

While Trump is the most vocal anti-press president in recent memory, Karem said he isn’t the first to retaliate against journalists and their sources. He noted that Barack Obama used the Espionage Act nearly a dozen times to target whistleblowers.

“I have covered every president since Ronald Reagan. Every one of them has been complicit and guilty about destroying the First Amendment, free speech, and destroying our ability to use confidential sources,” Karem said. “Donald Trump is merely a symptom of the problem.”

Restriction and intimidation aren’t excuses for the press to throw in the towel. Karem said that newsrooms must find other ways to retrieve vetted factual information, which he described as “the coin of the realm.”

If they can’t access a press briefing or pool reporting seat, reporters can still focus on sourcing, building deeper relationships with those on their beats, and gathering information from people and places where restrictions don’t apply, Karem said.

“You’ve got to stand up to a bully,” he added. “There is nothing that is more antithetical to the idea of free press, free speech, and speaking truth to power than the moves that Donald Trump has made in his second administration.”

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