Sunday, August 11, 2024
Have Reform committed a data protection breach?
They say that their investigation has found that people visiting the website for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party had details of their activity captured by a digital surveillance tool known as a Meta pixel:
The tracker – active in the run-up to the election, and as recently as last week – was triggered automatically on loading the Reform site, regardless of whether the person gave consent. It then sent a package of data to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, with details of which webpages had been viewed, when, and the buttons that were clicked.
In some cases, this included sensitive information that could reveal a person’s political beliefs, such as details of those accessing forms to become Reform UK members, linked to a unique Facebook user ID.
Data gathered by the Meta pixel enters the firm’s advertising system and can be used for Meta’s own purposes as well as by advertisers such as Reform to re-target audiences with tailored ads.
It is not known exactly how many people’s data was shared with Meta, but Reform said about 1.1 million visited its website in the month to 15 July. Web archives indicate the tracking tool was in use for at least two years. The party removed it after being contacted for comment last week. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is examining the case.
The findings raise questions about transparency and digital surveillance following a historic election result for Reform UK, in which it won 14% of the vote and five MPs were elected.
Meta pixel and similar trackers are widely used by political parties and other organisations to collect data for analytics and marketing purposes, but it is against the law to use them unless consent has been “actively and clearly” given.
Data that could reveal a person’s political beliefs is classed as special category and is subject to stricter protections by law because its misuse could pose “significant risks to the individual’s fundamental rights and freedoms”.
Reform UK has claimed that it prioritises privacy and resists “surveillance”, pledging in its manifesto to create a British bill of rights that would protect people’s “freedoms”. It says: “Our data and privacy must be protected. Surveillance of the public must be limited and those monitoring us held to account.”
But the Observer’s testing, checked by independent experts, suggests a failure to follow the rules, with the Meta pixel extracting information before consent had been given, and even if the person clicked “deny”.
Mark Richards, a software engineer and expert in online privacy, said the tracking raised ethical questions.People visiting Reform’s website for research risked being incorrectly labelled as someone with an interest in the party, he said. Meanwhile, those clicking links to become a member were revealing “sensitive political information about who they are and what they believe in”, which they may not wish to share.
Now the Information Commissioner's Office is examining the information about Reform’s use of tracking pixels as part of a wider review of “the data protection harms arising from use of online tracking technologies”. This could get interesting.
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Bearing in mind the regularity and ease with which Mr Farage changes his political spots, I wonder if it does get seriously interesting, whether Reform will quietly disappear and be replaced by yet another "unrelated" entity to continue his mission of disrupting the entire political scene and replacing it with chaos.
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