Visions of Grandma Craver appeared after I received a note from Nick alerting me to a project at Princeton University analyzing political emails.

Grandma Craver despised hypocrites.  No matter whether their hypocrisy was of the religious, moral, or political variety she simply labeled them all with the disdainful phrase: “Everyone who talks about heaven ain’t going there.”

Every Agitator is well aware of issues involving donor privacy and I’m sure you’re equally aware of the hand-wringing concern state legislators and Members of Congress have shown over the issue as they rail about the invasions of our personal privacy through data sharing by Facebook, Google, Amazon and hundreds of additional tech, advertising and e-commerce firms.

And, as we’ve reported multiple times these noble political guardians of our privacy have enacted fairly tough privacy legislation in California and a number of other states, while various Congressional legislators threaten the same on the federal level.

Enter The Princeton Corpus of Political Emails— the motherload of hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of consumer and donor privacy.

Using an automated email signup bot to collect emails from candidates running for state and federal office, political parties, and other political organizations such as PACs.  As of October 11^th they had collected 271,390 emails from 3,066 senders.  (You can see the ‘senders’ and the number of emails they sent here).

Calling out hypocrisy over privacy was not the main driver behind creating this collection of emails.  Rather it was to inform a paper titled Manipulative Tactics are the Norm In Policital Emails . In the paper the authors highlight six behavioral science nudges and tactics they find to be both the “norm” and “manipulative” when it comes to political emails.  From the Abstract to their paper:

“The majority of emails nudge recipients to open them by employing at least one of six manipulative tactics that we identified; the median sender uses such tactics 43% of the time. Some of these tactics are well known, such as sensationalistic subject lines. Others are more devious, such as deceptively formatted “From:” lines that attempt to trick recipients into believing that the message is a continuation of an ongoing conversation. Manipulative fundraising tactics are also rife in the bodies of emails.”

To learn more about what the authors consider ‘manipulative tactics” read the full paper here.  And be aware The Agitator notes they overlooked some of the really effective political nudge goodies like “Chip in” language. (You can get a quick overview of the authors’ choices here.)

But I digress.

Back to Hypocrisy and Privacy.

• Email list sharing among political campaigns and organizations is downright promiscuous. 200 of the entities studied shared their email lists 348 times.
• The majority (114) of those that shared their lists had no privacy policy on their websites.
• “Only about a quarter (48) disclosed their practice of email sharing in their privacy policies. Out of the remaining 38, 12 did not mention email sharing in their privacy policies, 14 falsely claimed they do not share any personal information with other entities, and 12 had disclosures about email sharing that were too ambiguous to determine whether or not the sharing we observed was permitted. “

I fully realize that for the next three weeks we all have a hell of a lot more important waves of political hypocrisy to concern us.  But for those readers thinking beyond the election I hope you’ll remember Grandma Craver when the freshly elected politicians once again begin raising their concerns and shedding crocodile tears about consumer privacy and donor privacy.

Roger