Under the auspices of the law (or lack thereof), the political parties became serial harassers on Election Day. Almost every one of us received dozens of messages and phone calls from the various parties on Tuesday, regardless of religion, race, or political opinion.
It seems that in election number 4, the parties went one step too far in their increasing use of our information in general - and our phones in particular.
Many reported on social media that they received dozens of messages and phone calls from politicians urging them to go out and vote.
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Some people reported receiving messages and phone calls from parties on both sides of the political map - from the Joint List to Religious Zionism, while many reported receiving mainly messages and phone calls from one side of the political map.
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The latest practice raises the question of whether the messages were sent after segmenting and characterizing the voters? And if so, based on what information? Place of residence, affiliation with Facebook groups, past party membership? Anything is possible, especially since there is no real way to know the source of the information.
In each of the last election cycles, we have seen parties step up their game in terms of using our data to recruit potential voters and gain a "tire-breaking" advantage. In the elections that just concluded, parties significantly decentralized their information infrastructures, from voter management and tracking apps (such as Elector), to bots that poll voters on political positions, to personalized messages to encourage voting.
Today, it can be stated unequivocally – we are in information chaos, and we have lost control. We do not know where our information is, where it goes, and how it is used. Worse, it seems that even those who use the information do not always know what its source is, and whether its use is legal.
A tangible example of this are the personal messages recently sent by the Likud party, addressing people by their first name or by their familiar nickname.
The prevailing assumption is that the recipient's identification was carried out by cross-referencing with the database of the contact identification application, TrueCaller.
Does the Likud database draw information directly from the TrueCaller database? That's one possibility, another possibility is that on the way from the TrueCaller database to the Likud database, there are many databases, or simply: trading in personal information.
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Although the automated messages and phone calls from the parties and politicians seem like one big, continuous spam, the "spam law" does not apply to election propaganda, so from the perspective of spam, this is a completely legal practice. A convenient arrangement of the legislator with himself.
However, the Privacy Protection Law sets out provisions regarding direct mailing, without an exemption for election propaganda. The Privacy Protection Authority even issued a clarification stating that the provisions of the Privacy Protection Law regarding direct mailing apply to messages sent by political parties based on the segmentation of a personal characteristic.
Segmentation can be based on place of residence, ethnic affiliation, religious affiliation, or any other information on the basis of which the party decides to send the recorded message specifically to you.
That is, any request from a party made on a segmentation basis must state (1) that it is a direct mail request, along with the number of the database from which the information was drawn, (2) a notice regarding a person's right to request to be deleted from the database, and (3) the identity of the party and the sources from which it received the information.
As is known, with the exception of publishing the party's identity, no legal requirement is actually met.
Regarding information trading, the Privacy Protection Law establishes a basic principle: Your information may not be used or published - unless you have consented to it.
""Trading in information without consent is illegal," the Privacy Protection Authority ruled. Of course, this did not prevent Religious Zionism and Shas from announcing before the elections that they were sharing information with the Likud party.
But law is one thing, reality is another. Today, there is almost no enforcement at all in the interface between invasion of privacy and freedom.
Regulators, the Privacy Protection Authority and the Central Elections Committee, rarely intervene and bring little order to our information chaos. Although privacy is an inherent right in democracy, we see before our eyes, election after election, the moral deterioration in everything that concerns the use of our information by political parties.
The message of the lack of enforcement is that it pays to violate privacy, and that our information - even though it is worth at least a few seats to the parties - is not important enough for them to enforce its use in a way that respects us and our right to choose.
The article was published in'transparent'
