Parties have a lot of valuable data about you. In fact, they’ve put an actual price on it

In a federal election where political parties seek every possible edge, voter data is one of the most precious resources.

Everything from electoral roll data, to data bought from commercial brokers, to basic voter interactions — such as emails to MPs, e-petitions or door-knocking records — is ingested by the major parties to help them decide which voters to contact, and with what messages. 

This, combined with the unprecedented tools provided by digital advertising, allows parties to create sophisticated campaigns which reach individual voters with targeted messaging, giving campaigners what they think is the best shot at getting people to vote, donate or volunteer.

Despite the importance and scale of these operations, we know very little about exactly what information is being collected about us.

Australia has scant few privacy restrictions on political parties due to exemptions in the Privacy Act, meaning the possibilities are limitless. 

Last week, an exposed form from the Victorian Liberals’ email provider gave some rare insight into the kinds of the data the party was interested in. It included categories like ethnicity (“Predicted Chinese”), religion (“Predicted Jewish”) and whether someone was a “Strong Liberal” or not.

These categories were options for voters listed in an email platform’s database used for sending out newsletters. It’s certain that the Liberal Party, much like the Labor Party and others, holds a wealth of other data sources and inferences on voters that goes far beyond this. 

While we don’t know what data they’re using, we do know political parties are literally putting a price on the value of these voter databases this election.

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Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and other social media networks, is probably the most important platform for digital advertising. Its combination of reach, with the majority of Australians on its platforms, and options for targeting users, means that political parties are happy to spend millions of dollars on the company’s advertising services during every week of the campaign.

Meta offers a number of ways to target its users with messages. The most popular way in the 2025 election so far is by geography — by neighbourhood, suburb, postal code, town and region — where parties blast messages out to every user in one location. This makes sense in elections where parties’ messages vary by electorate and candidate. Advertisers can also use demographics like gender, age, language, education, relationship status or even a user’s interests.

Another option is what Meta calls “customer list custom audiences”. This banal sounding form of targeting advertising allows advertisers, such as political parties, to upload data they hold, which the company then matches to data it holds on its own users, so messages can be targeted to a desired group of voters. 

According to data from Meta’s ad library, compiled by political ad tracking tool Who Targets Me, more than 15% of spending on political ads in the last month on Meta was targeted using voters based on this uploaded third-party data. This number grows even larger if you include another form of targeting, lookalike audiences, which lets advertisers target other users who are determined to be similar to those users targeted based on the uploaded data. 

Political parties spent more than $1.15 million on Facebook and Instagram ads in the past month using this particular method. It might have been for simple, uncontroversial uses. For example, targeting political ads about a policy to people who had emailed their MP about that same topic.

But there is potential for insidious and even exploitative uses. Australian tech advocacy group Reset.Tech Australia analysed an accidentally leaked dataset on Australians that split people up into categories including those who were assessed as “high credit risks”, “casino frequenters” or those who had “discount purchasing power” for alcoholic beverages. There’s nothing stopping a political party from purchasing sensitive data and using it to aim unethical messages at vulnerable people — and there’s no way that anyone else would know how or why they were targeted.

It’s this potential for unscrupulous and opaque behaviour, as well as fears of echo chambers created by parties sending different messages to different sets of people, that’s led groups like Civil Liberties Union for Europe to call for a ban on using customer lists in Meta for political advertising.

“[They] should be disallowed in order to protect the fundamental rights of the users and encourage a free and healthy public debate. Only by engaging in free and healthy public debates can the electorate make informed decisions about politics,” that group said in a 2022 report. 

With the most sophisticated advertising mechanism in human history at their fingertips, one in every six dollars spent by Australia’s political parties on Meta ads are on those guided by the troves of data they’ve harvested and obtained about voters. If it’s that important to them, perhaps it’s important enough for the rest of us to know more about how they’re using it. 

Do you feel comfortable knowing political parties have files on you?

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