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58 Osgoode Hall L. J. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/ohlj58 and id is 1 raw text is: 1 Voter Privacy and Big-Data Elections ELIZABETH F. JUDGE AND MICHAEL PAL* Big data and analytics have changed politics, with serious implications for the protection of personal privacy and for democracy. Political parties now hold large amounts of personal information about the individuals from whom they seek political contributions and, at election time, votes. This voter data is used for a variety of purposes, including voter contact and turnout, fundraising, honing of political messaging, and microtargeted communications designed specifically to appeal to small subsets of voters. Yet both privacy laws and election laws in Canada have failed to keep up with these developments in political campaigning and are in need of reform to protect voter privacy. We provide an overview of big data campaign practices, analyze the gaps in Canadian federal privacy and election law that enable such practices, and offer recommendations to amend federal laws to address the threats to voter privacy posed by big data campaigns. Dr. Elizabeth F. Judge is Professor of Law and a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Michael Pal is an Associate Professor and a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. We are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support for early research on this project awarded through a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant. Our KSG Report, Privacy and the Electorate: Big Data and the Personalization of Politics, (2016) is available at <techlaw.uottawa.ca/sshrc-ksg-privacy-and-electorate>. We thank Amir M Korhani, PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa, for his outstanding research assistance and dedication to the project.

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