Posted on 03/04/2004 8:22:05 AM PST by Liz
Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign used a controversial marketing practice offered by one of the country's three credit bureaus to collect additional information last year about people who, according to the campaign, indicated that they would like to help the candidate in the primaries and caucuses.
ROLL CALL reports on Thursday: The contracts with Equifax Marketing Services worth about $36,000 called for the company to find so-called 'appendages' in its massive consumer database. Appending is a practice that involves plugging bits of information into databases in order to collect e-mail addresses or flesh out consumer profiles. The practice has been widely attacked by consumer advocates, who consider it invasive.
Marketing experts believe Kerry's campaign is the first political committee to make use of the append, a relatively recent innovation that has emerged as retail commerce has increasingly moved online.
Developing....
Sorry, Drudge. This has been used for many years already. Software like GeoVoter has been around for over 5 years. You take that credit union data and append it to your database and bingo. It's awesome.
Actually the practice is vilified by privacy advocates and consider it pervasive. Data mining through a credit bureau? You don't say?
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