As Australia prepares for elections this month, Reuters reports on how the country is one of the most susceptible in terms of online information gathering by political campaigns. Australia's privacy laws do not cover political parties and candidates, which have access to the electoral roll data that features the names and addresses of 16 million compulsory voters. Political parties also use voter email addresses to match social media profiles and then combine those results with the roll data. “Most Australians have little idea about how many data points organisations like political parties, let alone Facebook, have on each of them,” Macquarie University Political Scientist Glenn Kefford said. “They would be shocked and probably disgusted.”
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