With the advent of new communication technologies, CNIL (the French Data Protection Authority) will update its recommendation passed in 2006 on political communication. According to CNIL, the last French election campaigns and especially the American ones have used innovative political communication practices relying on the development of ICT. In 2006, at the dawn of presidential and legislative elections, the French authority for privacy and personal data protection had outlined a certain number of practices, such as the management of internal data of political parties (which, according to article 8 of the Data Protection Act of January 6, 1978, don’t need to be declared and don’t require the common agreement of the party members), the organization of sponsorships and political communication operations : forbidding the use of local administrations files and local community files, use of the electoral rolls and commercial files...
Obviously, the techniques have well developped since then, notably with the explosion of social networks, supported by the omnipresence of on-line videos. According to CNIL, "these new practices are sometimes misunderstood by the persons that are the object of such communication operations and raise new questions about privacy and personal and public liberties". Moreover, the commission addresses the political representatives regularly in order to remind good practices and, more particularly, the obligation to inform the persons about the political purpose of the data processing, about their right to object to data use for political communication purposes, or about the fact that only the persons having expressly agreed on data use can be canvassed over the Internet. But due to "the specificity of political communication operations as well as to the use of particularly intrusive technologies, CNIL has to pay particular attention to the protection of the rights and liberties of the persons whose data are being collected and used".
CNIL unveiled its intention during the presentation of its annual activity report for 2009, which revealed a strong growth of its activity, with 719 adopted deliberations (+23 % in one year) and 270 audits (24 %). The commission received more than 4,200 complaints in the process and issued 5 financial sanctions and 4 warnings.
- CNIL's 2009 annual activity report (in French)
