Campaign tool supplied to UK’s governing party by Trump-Pence app dev quietly taken out of service — thanks to GDPR
Summary
Prior to May 23, the privacy policy of the Conservatives’ digital campaigning app suggests it was harvesting contacts data from users — and potentially sharing non-users’ personal information with entities of uCampaign’s choosing (given, for example, the company’s privacy policy gave itself the right to “share your Personal Information with other organizations, groups, causes, campaigns, political organizations, and our clients that we believe have similar viewpoints, principles or objectives as us”). We asked the Conservative Party a number of questions about the Campaigner app via email — after a press office spokeswoman declined to discuss the matter on the telephone. Similarly, the former deputy director & head of digital strategy for the Conservative party, Anthony Hind, declined to engage with the same data protection concerns when we raised them with him directly, back in July. That has been true throughout our operations in the EU.” The company’s website still includes the UK Conservative Party listed as a client — though the language used on the webpage does not make it explicit whether or not the party is a current client… Another graphic on the same page plots the UK flag on a world map depicting what uCampaign dubs its “global platform”, where it’s marked along with several other European flags — including Ireland, France, Germany and Malta, suggesting uCampaign has — or had — multiple European clients. Peters also suggested uCampaign is suspending all its European activity for now, as new data protection rules bed down, telling TechCrunch: “At this point, we are choosing to focus our business expansion in other areas of the world without GDPR-style regulatory regimes.