 Buying Your Vote Dark Money and Big Data 
 
 President Obama's re-election campaign is reportedly building a massive database of information about potential supporters. Earlier this month, we built an interactive graphic showing how different Obama supporters received different variations of the same email — one way that the campaign may be using data to personalize messages. The changes are minor but may highlight the ways that political campaigns are increasingly tailoring their messages — and their funding requests — using personal information about potential voters. The messages also may be tailored to individual voters based on the campaign's extensive database of personal information. While appeals to specific voters have long been a part of campaigns, politicians now have the ability to "microtarget" voters based on everything from their donation histories to what religions they list on Facebook. But we couldn't find any way to take yourself off its database — and the campaign wouldn't comment.
– President Obama's re-election campaign has by all accounts an impressive voter database that is getting more comprehensive by the day. But exactly how much information it is storing about supporters and what it intends to do with the cache remain big unknowns because the campaign won't talk about it, reports Lois Beckett at ProPublica. The database collects nuts-and-bolts info provided by supporters such as email addresses and ZIP codes, but it also tracks what they view on the campaign website and, via cookies from third-party ad vendors, elsewhere on the Internet. Those who log onto the website via Facebook give the campaign access to all the information they've made public there. And don't expect it all to magically disappear when the election is over. The "campaign's privacy policy reserves the right to share the personal information it collects 'with candidates, organizations, groups or causes that we believe have similar political viewpoints, principles or objectives.'" Click to read the full article here, or to read an earlier story on the the campaign's marketing strategy here.