A look at data brokers selling “comprehensive” profiles of potential voters to campaigns, including phone geolocation data gleaned from real-time auctions
Jon Keegan / The Markup : See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Political targeting has cycled through platforms before: in 2016 campaigns uploaded massive email lists and voter files to Facebook for cross-device ad targeting, and Cambridge Analytica's quiz-built psychological profiles became the scandal that was supposed to end the practice — yet by 2018 political data firms were still vacuuming up psychological and personal data on voters. The Markup's new reporting shows where the industry moved after the platform era: to data brokers selling comprehensive voter profiles directly to campaigns.
What's genuinely new is the sourcing — phone geolocation gleaned from real-time advertising auctions, the same bidstream infrastructure behind Microsoft's Xandr database of 650K+ audience segments. It arrives weeks after the Times documented campaigns using voter-profiling companies and vast datasets to target ads on guns, vaccines, and QAnon ahead of the midterms.
First-order effects
- Campaigns buying these profiles get physical-movement history attached to voter files — a capability that previously required app SDK partnerships or carrier deals, now purchasable off the shelf from brokers.
Second-order effects
- Ad-tech intermediaries running real-time auctions face renewed scrutiny as the leak point for location data, pressuring them toward stricter buyer vetting or contractual bans on political use of bidstream data.
Third-order effects
- If bidstream-derived voter profiling persists post-Cambridge Analytica, the likely fix shifts from platform self-regulation to legislation specifically covering data brokers and real-time bidding — a structural gap no single-platform scandal has closed.
The trend: Political voter targeting is migrating from social-platform data harvesting to broker-sold profiles enriched with real-time-bidding geolocation, outpacing the platform-centric reforms each prior scandal produced.