The National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) has ordered an investigation into the misuse of personal data in connection with a mass theft of data from the DatAdat Group, which is linked to former Prime Minister Gordon Bagnai. The companies running the campaign on the left, and of course the Peter Markie Z campaign, sent millions of text messages and made phone calls at the end of the campaign trail from an illegally acquired database. In addition to the police, the Data Protection Authority is also investigating what happened.
The National Police Reserve Investigation Bureau is investigating the misuse of personal data against an unknown perpetrator, the National Police Command informed Mediaworks News Center after we inquired about the criminal prosecution of millions of SMS and group phone calls during the election campaign. New York did not want to reveal any details other than the truth of the investigation.
As is known, in addition to the police, the National Data Protection and Freedom of Information Authority is investigating the matter. And Attila Peterfalvi, the head of the authority, had said earlier that they had received a number of complaints, noting that he himself had received such a short message, which he also submitted to the registration system. He stressed that the investigation may take several months.
Even before the elections, the press learned that a joint investigation by service providers and the authorities found that the campaign had been ordered by the Austrian subsidiary DatAdat through an intermediary company, and that the company provided a huge database of the process.
It was also clarified that the illegally obtained set of data consisted of contact numbers extracted from Facebook profiles, in particular Messenger, and contacts obtained from banking and business databases.
According to experts, we can only talk about a process in which there was no choice among the target people, and here the main aspect was to reach the largest possible number of voters. According to them, the exact actions carried out by Datadat began long before the campaign.
With the release of several internal audio recordings, a number of details about the operation of DatAdat were recently revealed. The leaders and employees of the company group themselves spoke about the fact that they influenced the political processes in dozens of countries, and at home the phishing group of companies could also decide the opposition pre-elections in favor of Peter Markie G. The group’s foreign professionals from Austria worked on the left-wing campaign, creating fake Facebook profiles and employing payroll comments, among other things, to amplify important content of the left on social media.
The so-called chatbots used by companies such as DatAdat collect data in an imperceptible way to users, hiding their real activities, for example, a contest or another player’s puzzle. From answers to test questions – and other interactions – they can set the political preferences of Facebook users as well as filter out unsafe masked voters.
The more data, the more accurate the algorithms that determine who the political message is going through. In addition, by analyzing the extracted data, a user profile can be created, based on the ease of knowing skin colour, sexual orientation and political sympathy.
The effectiveness of such analyzes was highlighted by the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal. CA created a profile of users and classified voters, and were able to influence the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election through personalized, targeted ads and messages aggregated with artificial intelligence.
However, phishing and profiling are also not a panacea, as evidenced by the fact that the Hungarian left suffered a historic defeat despite DatAdat’s SMS-supported campaign activities.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data protection rules in Europe were tightened dramatically. These could easily have been circumvented by Bajnai and its affiliate DatAdat, as some of the group’s companies are registered in Estonia, where, like other Baltic states, compliance with data protection rules is significantly relaxed.
