Recent actions by the European Parliament in February in support of tougher political advertising rules make the latest strategic action by the Austrian privacy group NOYB rather interesting. On Tuesday, 21 March, NOYB announced it had filed complaints against every German political party for processing voters’ personal data using Facebook’s microtargeting adtech platform during the 2021 federal elections. NOYB's complaints allege that Facebook and the political parties violated the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by failing to obtain explicit consent. Information on political opinions is classified as special category data under Article 9 of the GDPR.
Felix Mikolasch, a privacy lawyer at NOYB, said: "Any data on a person's political views is protected particularly strictly by the GDPR. Such data is not only extremely sensitive, but also allows large-scale manipulation of voters, as Cambridge Analytica has shown."
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