The Obama presidential campaign is launching an effort to collect Republican email addresses by inviting its supporters to submit information about their Republican associates to the Obama 2012 website.
The effort could help the Obama campaign build a database that would enable it to target Republican voters during the general election campaign. But, more perniciously, it could also become part of an Democratic effort to influence Republican primary voters to select a candidate Democrats think Obama could most easily defeat....
The Obama information collection effort is cast under the mischievous guise of asking Obama supporters to "have a little fun at the expense of a Republican in your life" by signing them up to get an email from the Obama campaign ribbing them for having "inspired" the Obama supporter to donate.
The result, however, is that the Obama campaign gets a new trove of Republican email addresses that it could never have collected through voluntary submissions.
Now as of this moment if you go to the linked Obama donation website, you see this phrase included: "(Don't worry—we won't hold on to any of their information.)" First, this is apparently a recent addition to the page, as this doesn't appear in google's cache of the same page, although to be strictly fair, this might be simply clarifying what they intended all along. Second, this amounts to a matter of trust; do you trust them to do what they say they will? And more importantly, should you be risking someone else's privacy by doing so?
And of course this all fits a pattern. Previously, it was "Fight the Smears" and "Attack Watch," urging liberals to snitch out any person criticizing the President. Why exactly shouldn't we believe this is more of the same?
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Follow me on Twitter at @AaronWorthing, mostly for snark and site updates.
No, i don't know why the text of this post is on the small side. i will try to fix it after dinner.
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