Australian political parties are using voter email addresses to find matching social media profiles and combining them with the country's compulsory electoral roll data, illustrating how privacy scandals have done little to slow the march of data-driven campaigning.
While the use of data and public profiles from Facebook, Twitter and other social media for political campaigning has become widespread globally, Australia is one of the countries most open to online information gathering by political operatives.
"Most Australians have little idea about how many data points organizations like political parties, let alone Facebook, have on each of them," said Glenn Kefford, a political scientist at Macquarie University who has written extensively about data-driven campaigning. "They would be shocked and probably disgusted."