Republican CD gathers voter data: Will the voters know?

From Minnesota Public Radio:

GOP peers into voters' data with CD
by Tom Scheck, Minnesota Public Radio
March 1, 2006

St. Paul, Minn. - The GOP says they intend to send thousands of the CD-roms to a wide array voters who may be concerned about the issue of gay marriage. The compact discs contain video clips from four of Minnesota's top elected officials. They talk about the cultural dangers of gay marriage, activist judges and why an amendment is needed to keep marriage between one man and one woman....

Republican Party Chair Ron Carey said the video is an attempt to get the DFL Senate to vote on a constitutional amendment to define marriage as only between one man and one woman. At the CD's unveiling, he never mentioned that the party is also using the video to collect information about those who view the video.

Are the Minnesota Republicans trying to hide something? Or did they simply assume that those who responded to the CD's survey would understand that their information would be collected?

Regardless of the reason, any group that sends out an interactive CD of this sort should explicitly state that user info will be collected. And the Minnesota GOP has said they will do just that.

Now for a bit of self-revelation:

Some of you may have noticed the image at the end of the right-hand column on this page. By clicking on it, visitors will be taken to our statistics page, which reveals how many hits voxverax.com receives, plus a myriad of other information including website referrer (if there is one), server origination, country origination, operating system, browser, and much more. This is all information that your computer sends to every website server each time it accesses a webpage.

In other words, like many (if not a majority of) websites, we are able to learn a lot about our visitors.

Do most web users realize this? Probably not.

We could have chosen to collect this information privately, making it only available to ourselves -- most websites do it this way -- but we feel that runs counter to our belief of openness. In short, every visitor to voxverax.com has the same access to the same information we do.

We don't expect the Minnesota GOP to share the info they gather from their interactive CD as openly as we share ours, but then again we wouldn't expect the Minnesota DFL to share either. That's politics, which unfortunately today is more about raising money, winning elections and serving a funding constituency than good governance.

Perhaps someday this will change. We hope so.

In the meanwhile, whether you are using an interactive CD or surfing the web, be well advised to heed the warning "caveat spectator" -- or "viewer beware".

LP