While there is a political storm over the alleged ‘theft’ of voter data by Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Trust, which impersonated civic body officials in Bengaluru from August to November, experts say the larger question of how and whether the data can be retrieved at all is critical.
Despite the fact that the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) revoked Chilume’s permission to carry out the Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) campaign on November 2, no steps have been taken to recover the data that could be misused.
Given that electioneering is increasingly becoming “professionalised,” with consultancy firms and big data playing a key role, the value of the information said to have been gathered in the run-up to the Assembly elections is enormous, according to a city MLA who did not want to be identified. “Such data can allow us to target our campaign better. Spatial data, mapped at a household level, removes the hazy assumptions most of us work with and gives campaigns an edge,” he said.
According to experts and election observers, collecting data in this manner not only violates privacy, gives political players with access to this data an unfair advantage, but also has the potential to enable voter suppression. They demanded all copies of the data and stringent action.
“It is said that those who run the accused Trust also run a political consultancy firm, which the Opposition has alleged is associated with a member of the ruling party. This throws up a scary scenario. If there is systemic collusion, there is a potential for targeted voter suppression by deletion of entries from electoral rolls, presently a big concern in the U.S. Right now, there is no evidence to suggest it has happened. But such an exercise has the potential to enable it, which is why there needs to be a thorough probe,” said Harish Narasappa of Karnataka Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms.
P.G. Bhat, senior electoral rolls analyst, said that while a probe would serve as a deterrent, he was sceptical about data recovery. “Any number of copies of the data could be anywhere in the world on the cloud. It is practically impossible to prevent the data from falling into the hands of those who are ready to pay for it. Even before this scandal broke, there have been many improprieties carried out with data from the electoral rolls itself,” he said.
Trust’s office searched
The agencies now in charge of the investigation into the scandal stated that recovering the data was one of their top priorities. The Halasuru Gate police broke into the Trust’s offices in Malleswaram on Friday and recovered electronic devices from the premises. They are on the lookout for Trust officers who are currently on the run. According to a senior police official with experience in cybercrime investigations, confiscating all copies of the data is nearly impossible. “Precious time has been lost and the data would have already been passed on,” he stated.
Meanwhile, Amlan Aditya Biswas, Regional Commissioner, Bengaluru Region, who has been tasked by CEO, Karnataka, with investigating the scandal, told a reporter that he would soon serve notices on the Chilume Trust to appear before him. “I will be looking into the questionnaire used, and the kind of data collected by the Trust. There are reports that the data was fed into a private internal app. I will initiate steps towards recovering data,” he said.