AggregateIQ Broke Privacy Laws in Brexit Campaign

Canadian data firm AggregateIQ (AIQ) has been found to have broken privacy laws with some of the work it carried out for pro-Brexit campaign group Vote Leave and several US political campaigns.

In 2016, British Columbia-based AIQ was hired by Vote Leave, which campaigned for the UK to leave the EU, to develop Facebook ad campaigns aimed at voters; and AIQ then disclosed the resulting data to Facebook. Last year, AIQ was accused of various breaches of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), including processing data without a lawful basis and failing to provide clear information to individuals about its use.

According to Canada's Federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien, and his British Columbia counterpart Michael McEvoy, AIQ did not take measures to ensure it had the authority to disclose UK voter information, and Vote Leave had not explained to respondents that their information might be shared with Facebook. In their report, Therrien and McEvoy stated: 'When the company used and disclosed the personal information of Vote Leave supporters to Facebook, it went beyond the purposes for which Vote Leave had consent to use that information. When AIQ failed to ensure it had meaningful consent from the individuals whose personal information it collected, used, or disclosed, it contravened British Columbia and Canadian privacy laws,'

The report also found that AIQ had not obtained consent regarding some of the work it had done on campaigns in the US for Strategic Communication Laboratories (the SCL Group), parent company of Cambridge Analytica, which was found to have illegally harvested data from more than 87 million Facebook profiles to target users with political ads.

Web site: www.aggregateiq.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.