Microsoft & Yahoo are selling politicians your personal information.
Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services.
The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting.
Campaigns use voters records to assemble lists of people they're trying to reach — for instance, "registered Republicans that have made a donation," Yahoo's director of sales Andy Cotten told ProPublica. Microsoft and Yahoo help campaigns find these people online and then send them tailored ads.
These messages don't just pop up in Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Because Microsoft and Yahoo operate huge networks that provide advertising on some of the most popular web destinations, targeted ads can appear when a voter visits a swath of different sites.
Microsoft and Yahoo said they safeguard the privacy of their users and do not share their users' personal information directly with the campaigns. Both companies also said they do not see the campaigns' political data, because the match of voter names and registration data is done by a third company. They say the matching is done to target groups of similar voters, and not named individuals.
The marketing site ClickZ, the Wall Street Journal, Slate and others have previously noted the ability of campaigns to target online ads to specific groups of voters. But what has not been detailed is which companies are now making the targeting possible by providing users' personal information — and which have decided it's off-limits.
Google's privacy policy classifies political beliefs as "sensitive personal information," which should not be used for online ad targeting. Facebook does allow political campaigns to target political advertisements, but only on the basis of political beliefs reported by the users themselves, rather than information culled from their voting records.
Microsoft and Yahoo's targeting service combines two crucial factors: their knowledge of users' personal information and their ability to add cookies to browsers. Over the years, Internet users have given these companies their name when they signed up for free programs like the Microsoft suite of services known as Windows Live, which includes Hotmail. (Microsoft said it does not sell campaigns access to information users provide when they register for Office or other Microsoft products they've bought.)
Microsoft and Yahoo both said the cookies aren't connected directly to names or other personally identifying information. Instead, they use a complicated process to match coded voter information back to anonymous cookies on particular users' browsers.
But many parts of the process remain unclear since the companies were reluctant to explain the details of their matching and targeting.
Microsoft said that the credit reporting giant Experian performs a "double-blind" match between Microsoft's data and campaigns' data. Yahoo uses another massive data company, Acxiom. Both Experian and Acxiom also offer similar matching for commercial clients who want to find previous customers online.
"They don't need your permission to do this," said William McGeveran, a data privacy expert at the University of Minnesota Law School. As long as a company has not explicitly promised users not to do this kind of matching, the process is legal for both political and commercial entities, McGeveran said.
http://www.propublica.org/article/how-microsoft-and-yahoo-are-selling-politicians-access-to-you