Tuesday 10 October 2017

US far right involved in Australian postal survey for No side - invasion of privacy concerns

Clients of uCampaign
How is that even legal? How can a foreign power be allowed to exert influence over a domestic Australian survey run by the Bureau of Statistics? Americans are crying foul about Russian influence in their presidential election, but now the Yanks are doing the same thing to Australia. The app released even uses miles and yards instead of kilometres and metres.

Fuck off Yanks and mind your own bloody business! Keep your nose out of our elections. It's bad enough that ever Australian far right loony gets to "have their say" on our lives, let alone those fuckwits in the US too.

An email sent from the Equality campaign explains:
We’ve known for a while now that the ‘no’ campaign has some big backers from the right in the USA. But last week we had it confirmed.


The 'no' campaign have launched their ‘Freedom Team’ app. According to the Sydney Morning Herald the app was developed for them by “American company Political Social Media LLC, trading as uCampaign, which built apps for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, Brexit's "Vote Leave" and the powerful National Rifle Association.” [1] The app prompts ‘no’ supporters to visit the homes of undecided voters.


The ‘no’ campaign have already received help from right wing sources in the USA. Republican-linked US pollster WPA Intelligence has been targeting households with robocalls which the Australian Market and Social Research Society described as “push polling” for the ‘no’ campaign.


All of this can’t have been cheap.


Let me level with you. We don’t have this kind of backing. We never expected to – but we also didn’t think the ‘no’ side would be linked so heavily to the American right.


The ‘no’ campaign have been 100% negative and have tried to talk about anything but marriage equality, while our YES campaign has been 100% positive and talked about a fairer Australia.


We don’t need to match the ‘no’ campaign. But we do need to make sure our campaign can reach those YES supporters who haven’t yet posted their YES.


We’re doing that through highly effective online advertising aimed at getting YES supporters who haven’t posted yet posted their form to get their YES vote in the mail.


Can you help us continue to message these voters?
You can donate to the equality campaign here

The Sydney Morning Herald has more. If you thought a random text message was invasive, get a load of this. If this isn't an invasion of anyone's privacy then I don't know what is:
Among the features of the "Freedom Team" app, launched Wednesday evening, is a tool that maps the home addresses of people whom the Coalition for Marriage says have not yet engaged with the campaign. 


 "The app will provide turn by turn directions to your nearest neighbour who is yet to hear from the campaign," the Coalition told supporters in an email. "And it will give you talking points for when you get to the door." 


The design means people's home addresses are supplied to thousands of potential doorknockers. After visiting the home, users can mark the resident as "not home", "refused", "bad info" or "survey", indicating they have been interviewed. 


 It was not clear how the list of addresses was generated. The Coalition for Marriage said the data it used came from the Australian census and the government's freely available Geocoded National Address File. 


The app was clunky when tested on Thursday. Fairfax Media was able to mark a resident as "not home" or "refused" without actually traveling to the address, although the app required the user to be within 18 yards (16 metres) of the home to actually commence a "survey" (the app measures distance in imperial units including yards and miles). 

 As with uCampaign's products in the US, the Freedom Team app attempts to "gamify" the campaign by creating a social network and allocating "action points" to users for each activity or referral they undertake. Sydney Morning Herald
  What's more, they're using the archaic old US imperial system of miles and yards. Miles and yards? Only in America, not Australia. This imported app has no place in our country or our democracy. Imagine if this was a federal election and this was happening. There'd rightly be an uproar. Why is it OK to do it in a survey of Australians about our lives?

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