How Much Should the Candidates Know About You?

Liz Klimas shares details of the Obama campaign's "data mining":

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/very-creepy-details-of-obama-campaigns-voter-data-mining-effort/

Is this a legitimate, even helpful, way for elected officials to stay in touch with their constituents? Is it as all-American and wholesome as the Clinton administration's use of charming, attractive White House aides to chat up tourists and local residents? This web site doesn't doubt it. The White House blog producers want to know what you read or viewed, and what you thought of it, for the same innocent reasons we want to know those things.

Is that all there is to any data-gathering effort? Unfortunately, no. When you share a little public personal information with a web site, as it might be with a comment to this blog like "I'm a teacher in the Des Moines schools, and I think...", what's always supposed to happen is that the person or people who put together that web site absorb the useful part of that information: "We have a reader who is a teacher in Des Moines. We might have more of them. Maybe we want to post more news links from Iowa."

When you share that kind of information with a commercial web site, what's likely to happen is that you get annoyingly personalized spam: "TRACY, as a TEACHER IN DES MOINES, YOU undoubtedly want..."

When you share that kind of information with a government web site...let's just say that at best you're entrusting something valuable to government employees you don't know personally. These individuals may be very nice. They may be vulnerable to other individuals who are nasty...like Al-Qaeda, or like some lunatic group that may arise and try to hijack the U.S. government, which will become a more tempting target with every "convenient" piece of access to information, property, or power the government gets.

This web site recommends being safety-cautious. Of course, if you trust someone to run your state or country, you would trust that person not to abuse your home phone number. That does not necessarily mean that it's a good idea to expect that person to be responsible for storing your home phone number. As always, be very very careful what you "tell" any computer.