[W]here did the original list of persuadable voters come from? My guess is that it was from an amalgam of poll and phone bank data. This is the ethical hole in Big Data’s bucket. Unless poll and phone bank respondents were explicitly told that their information would be used in such a manner, and the respondents granted their permission, use of such data is illicit.
When a pollster calls a household, there is an implicit understanding, or at least there has been and should be, that the call is confidential, that the answers an individual provides will only be reported and used in the aggregate, combined with responses of all others polled.
Pollsters who are members of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and other professional survey organizations acknowledge annually their commitment to this standard of confidentiality. This is not simply a matter of being fussy professionally. It is sound business practice.
If poll respondents believe that we are going to deposit their individual responses in a data silo to be used later to persuade them how to vote, they will stop doing interviews, and the randomness of our samples will be compromised. Confidentiality must be preserved to sustain the broad-based cooperation of the public.
A long-standing fly in the ointment has been “phone banks” hired by campaigns and party committees that pose as pollsters to collect data like candidate preference, ideology, likelihood of voting and issue preference. These faux polls are directed not at random samples but at whole electorates, and the results are explicitly headed for databases used to target individual voters.
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