Now that Senator Marco Rubio has officially announced his candidacy and his campaign site has added a privacy policy, we can add him to the PogoWasRight.coverage on the Election 2016 web site privacy policy issue.
Rubio’s policy is not as detailed and legalistic as Clinton’s and Paul’s. And like Cruz’s policy, also covered in the first post in this series, it fails to explain what information the site passively collects on site visitors, only noting what visitors may be specifically asked to enter.
The policy allows the campaign to share your information in ways that are consistent with what other campaign’s privacy policies have identified. And like other campaigns’ policies, the policy points out that there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email if you would like to unsubscribe from future emails.
Also like the other campaigns, Rubio’s campaign will share your information with third parties, including other “candidates to committed to our principles.” So if Rubio (or any other candidate that has this clause in their privacy policy) drops out and throws their support to candidate Doe, your information will be shared with Doe even if you hate Doe.
The sharing provisions combined with the clause that by using their site, you consent to their privacy policy, enables Rubio’s campaign to claim that they comply with the California Online Privacy Protection Act. To its credit, the policy is very clear that
This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.
The site’s privacy policy does not state what they do to protect your personal information.
Other
If you were an early reader of the first post in this series, you may have missed an update to that post that noted that Paul Schreiber has provided an analysis of the security of the campaign web sites. He, too, will be updating his coverage as changes to the sites are made or more candidates announce.
So far, PogoWasRight.org has not received a response from Senator Cruz’s campaign to the request for more information about their privacy policy. PogoWasRight.org has now also sent a similar inquiry to Senator Rubio’s site to ask what information their site passively collects about visitors and how they secure it.