Political campaigns have appropriated new marketing tools and techniques, and personal data has become a valuable asset for political communication between candidates and voters. If, on the one hand, this more personalized communication once held the promise of more efficient and meaningful engagement with voters, on the other, it poses new risks to electoral integrity and the guarantee of fundamental rights. Micro-targeting, risks of voter manipulation and concerns about the lack of transparency in campaigns have occupied part of the political communication agenda. Paradigmatic cases in recent years in national and international electoral processes illustrate how personal data can be collected through inappropriate means and used to manipulate voters and public opinion, damaging democracy itself. 

Against this backdrop, it is increasingly necessary for the discussion on personal data protection to be taken into electoral contexts as well. Understanding the importance of promoting an in-depth debate on data protection in electoral contexts, InternetLab, together with other organizations and researchers in the field of digital rights and electoral law, organized a Study Group on Data Protection and Elections, to discuss sensitive issues on the protection of personal data in the electoral context. The group published two documents: “Data Protection in Elections: Democracy and Privacy”, with the aim of organizing the discussion on the topic so that the actors involved in this ecosystem could make informed decisions in the 2020 electoral process, and the “Recommendations Report for the Current Brazilian Framework”, which identifies points of attention for the 2022 electoral process and proposes possible legal and regulatory paths, with the aim of ensuring regulation and law enforcement that is attentive to the specificities of the democratic process. The group also organized a module on personal data protection and elections for the Digital Electoral Law Course of the EJEs (Electoral Judicial School) of the TSE and TRE-RS in 2020. 

In order to gain a deeper understanding of how issues related to the protection of personal data in elections are being debated and addressed around the world, we conducted a comparative study on the legal and regulatory landscape in Latin America. Funded by CYRILLA, the research mapped the electoral and data protection regime in six Latin American countries. The results were published in the report Missing bridges: a comparative analysis of legal frameworks governing personal data in political campaigning in Latin America.