Minnesota Public Radio broke a story (picked up by Slashdot) about a DVD mailing campaign by the Republican Party of Minnesota. The DVD contains a survey which, when submitted, sends the survey-taker's responses back to a web site which then presents the data in an unsecured manner. The DVD evidently contains neither a privacy policy nor any other notification about how the submitted data will be used.
Minnesota, along with most other states and DC, has to keep data on registered voters under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Minnesota makes some data on registered voters available to the public on a county-by-county basis. Relevant Minnesota law appears to allow broad access to "name, address, year of birth, and voting history of each registered voter" in a county, so long as the data accessed are used for "elections, political activities, or law enforcement" purposes.
Some of the data collected by the DVD, therefore, is available to the Republican Party of Minnesota anyway. Nonetheless, a political entity is certainly likely to get even more value from its own, richer database of voters in targeted districts, like the one evidently being built from the DVD survey responses. Whether or not it is appropriate for the party to collect data without making their methods clear, they certainly shouldn't leave the data on an unprotected website.
Minnesota Republican Party collects voters' data directly
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