Conservative Party ‘broke law by racially profiling British voters’

BRITAIN’S ruling Conservative Party’s collection of data on 10 million UK voters around their ethnicity and religion was illegal, the Information Commissioner said.

Elizabeth Denham said the party had deleted the data following a recommendation by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Speaking to MPs on a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) sub-committee, Ms Denham said it was unacceptable that the party had used people’s names to attempt to derive their ethnicity and religion.

She said: “In our audit work, where we looked at the practices of all political parties, our recommendation was for any kind of ethnicity data to be deleted and the Conservative Party – I’m told and we have evidence that the Conservative Party have destroyed or deleted that information.”

Ms Denham said the party had done this voluntarily, but it would have ordered it to destroy the data if it had not agreed to do so.

She said: “Religion and ethnicity are both – like health information – special category data that requires a higher standard for a legal basis to collect.

“So, again, ethnicity is not an acceptable collection of data, there isn’t a legal basis that allows for the collection of that data.”

Asked to confirm if it was illegal, the Information Commissioner said: “It was illegal to collect the ethnicity data and that has been destroyed.”

Privacy campaigners responding to Ms Denham’s evidence said the ICO needed to do more to enforce rules around how political parties collect data on voters.

Jim Killock, of the Open Rights Group, said: “The Conservative Party’s racial profiling of voters was illegal.

“Elizabeth Denham finally confirmed the unlawful nature of this profiling by the Conservative Party under pressure from MPs on the DCMS committee.

“Yet the ICO still has not explained what parties can and cannot do. Mass profiling of voters continues, even if this data has been removed. The ICO needs to act to stop unlawful profiling practices. That’s their job.”

During her address, Ms Denham also revealed she does not use Facebook or WhatsApp and said she understood user concerns about the trustworthiness of the platforms.

Ms Denham said she did not use Facebook “by choice” and used Signal – an app that has seen a spike in new users since WhatsApp’s privacy changes announcement – for her “personal communications”.