POLITICIANS routinely engage consultants for electoral advice or to manage their campaigns, but they must draw the line at the consultants illegally mining personal data to achieve their goals, say analysts in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook  controversy.

Universiti Malaya political analyst Associate Professor Dr Awang Azman Awang Pawi said even if Cambridge Analytica (CA) had only played a small role in the 2013 Kedah Barisan Nasional election campaign, it was unethical if in doing so, it had harvested social media users’ personal information.

He said the issue was not whether BN had engaged CA for the job, but whether CA had illegally obtained or manipulated data to benefit its client, such as CA allegedly did for the Donald Trump presidential campaign.

“If they had done this then the actions of the government and the party (that hired CA) of misusing (personal) data and profiles are unforgivable,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

He was commenting on CA’s alleged involvement in the successful 2013 Kedah Barisan Nasional election campaign that saw the coaltion wrest the state back from Pakatan Rakyat after one term.

CA, a British firm, has been accused of using data collected from Facebook without permission in early 2014 to influence voters via targeted campaign messages for the Trump’ election campaign in 2016.

CA Political Global managing director Mark Turnbull had revealed to an undercover Channel 4 reporter that the firm did work in Malaysia.

On its website, CA says it “supported BN in Kedah state with a targeted messaging campaign highlighting their school improvements since 2008”.

BN took back Kedah from the opposition in GE13, winning 21 out of 36 state seats, and 10 out of 15 parliamentary seats.Both BN and former Kedah menteri besar Mukhriz Mahathir have denied using the firm’s services.

Mukhriz led BN’s election campaign in Kedah in 2013 and became the menteri besar after winning a state seat. His former media officer, Azrin Zizal, has accused him of lying about not engaging CA’s services during the campaign.

Azrin is now the Southeast Asia head of SCL Group, the parent company of CA.

Research institute Ilham Centre executive director Hisommudin Bakar said it was not right if CA had indeed collected voters’ profiles and personal information on social media to influence the outcome of the election.

“This is a violation of their (voters) privacy for the gain of the party in the general election. It’s material gathered to carry out political marketing,” he said.

Putrajaya is known to engage highly-paid strategic communications firms to bolster its image and run down the opposition. FBC Media (UK) and Apco are two of the firms known to have been hired by Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government.

FBC was reportedly paid RM28.35 million to work on a “global strategic communications campaign: in 2009, while Apso, an international public relations firm specialising in political and crisis management, was reportedly paid RM77 million for its services.

Associate Prof Dr Jeniri Amir of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, meanwhile, said it was unfair to say BN won Kedah in the last elections solely because of CA.

“CA might have played only a small role as BN would be looking at other data sources to prepare for the elections.

“They don’t only depend on one source, but they have to counter check with other sources.

“To say CA assisted in capturing Kedah is not right because there was other data involved as well.” – March 23, 2018.