Crikey for PM uses info you didn’t give us to target you with ads

Targeted ads are one of the go-to examples for people who believe their phone is listening to them. How did Facebook know I was just talking about Aretha Franklin and serve me ads for the special 50th anniversary edition of Young, Gifted and Black?

The truth is (or at least was until recently) that the phone was not listening. Not out of any deference to your privacy rights, mind you, but because it didn’t need to. You started shedding the kind of data that drives advertisers gaga the second you signed up to Facebook. Just how much we’ll get into in just a minute.

Political candidates are just as keen to drag their canteen through this river of personal information as any soulless corporation. So, while Crikey campaign headquarters doesn’t have access to anything like the sophisticated set-ups the major parties do, we thought we’d try our hand. Only, unlike the usual targeted ad that wants to hide how targeted it is, and present itself as what the party would be saying regardless, ours was very explicit:

If you got one of those and it was accurate, and you found it creepy, yes, that’s the point. But the likelihood is, our version won’t have been nearly as effective as the ads the big parties produce.

“If we had a campaign manager with some strategic nous, the Crikey for PM ads could have been a lot more targeted and effective,” Crystal Andrews, Crikey’s readers’ editor and founder of Zee Feedexplained (in needlessly personal terms, frankly).

We’re running our digital ads through Meta, targeting based on age and gender only, relying on Meta’s data (you would have likely handed over that info when you signed up to one of the company’s platforms like Facebook or Instagram). We also, for fun, targeted politicians and staffers in Parliament House.

“Meta’s ad platform allows advertisers to show users specific messages based on their interests, or topics and activities they’ve recently engaged in,” Andrews said. “We haven’t used any of those capabilities, which means we’ve inevitably wasted precious dollars showing ads to people in their 50s who rent (a higher proportion now than at any point in Australia’s history) and 26-year-old women who have never made a charitable donation, let alone to Greenpeace.”

As Andrews says, location-based targeting can also be fraught (“Lots of Crikey readers say they’re being shown political ads for electorates they haven’t lived in for years”). As a result, Andrews said, “our ad ‘targeting’ politicians in Canberra is almost certainly being seen by Canberrans who are not politicians at all.”

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“If we really wanted to do it like the big parties do, we could have plucked the personal email addresses of politicians from our subscriber database, uploaded the details to Meta and used it to target the ads to them alone… but we didn’t.”

But it gets far more granular than simply knowing direct contact details. You may recall, a tipster got in touch about a generic campaign email they received from the Liberal Party’s candidate for Melbourne. The receiver had never provided the party with their email address — but then again, unsolicited contact from politicians you didn’t ask to hear from is nothing new. But there was more. When the tipster dug a little deeper, he was shown, accidentally, just how much information the party had collected on him and what it was seeking to amass on its targets:

What [he] saw was a list of ‘preferences’ relating to his email subscription. Some fields were filled out, including name, email address, federal division, age, gender, birth date, and postcode … Several other fields weren’t filled out, including: ‘Strong Liberal’, ‘Online Donor’, ‘State Vote’, ‘Federal Vote’, ‘Predicted Chinese’ and ‘Predicted Jewish’.

It was revealed the same day that ALP candidate for Macnamara Josh Burns sought to collect (slightly less eye-opening, but still personal) information on voters, like whether the person being contacted went to a government school.

It’s an ongoing issue facing the major parties, particularly in the mass media age: voters are different and want different things, so you have to tell them different things on the same issues, but if you say those different things in front of cameras, everyone’s going to know. Hyper-targeted ads online can cut down on the exposure. For example, if you’re the Liberal Party and you know a voter is “predicted Chinese”, you know not to mention the return of Mike Pezzullo. Or if you’re say, Amelia Hamer in Kooyong, you might try this strategy…

Targeting allows parties and campaigns to provide different groups of voters with very different views of the same candidate — in whichever direction you choose. In the 2024 US presidential election, a political action committee linked to X owner Elon Musk targeted Arab-American voters with the message that Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was a strong ally of Israel, while Jewish voters got messaging that depicted her as a diehard supporter of Palestine.

And it’s not just the parties that take advantage of this. As Professors Daniel Angus and Mark Andrejevic write, campaigners like Advance use targeting online to single out groups “more likely to be influenced by selective, misleading or false information”.

It only gets darker from there. In 2023, tech advocacy group Reset.Tech Australia analysed an accidentally leaked dataset on Australians that listed more than 650,000 ways that people were being classified — known as “audience segments” — that can be used to specifically target messaging. Categories included people who had been assessed as having “high credit risks”, or being “casino frequenters”. As Cam Wilson wrote last week, there is “nothing stopping a political party from purchasing sensitive data and using it to aim unethical messages at vulnerable people — and there’s no way that anyone else would know how or why they were targeted”.

Social media behemoth Meta lets parties create “custom audiences” matching their own data to data Meta holds, allowing them to target specific audiences on the company’s platforms (primarily Facebook and Instagram). Political parties spent more than $1.15 million on Facebook and Instagram ads in the past month using this particular method.

As we’ve covered, there’s very little the average punter can do about any of this — political parties have exempted themselves from the Privacy Actso they will have a detailed file on you. You just can’t know what it contains or where they got it.