Departmental and regional elections, as for elections in Corse, Guyana and Martinican, that will be on the 20th and 27th June 2021, will be the occasion for a lot of political communications operations. The CNIL remembers all the main rules that need to be followed in order to comply to the GDPR and presents its action plan.
Mandatory compliance to the GDPR
Bad practices observed
During the last electoral campaigns, the CNIL has observed that personal data protection legislations are not always kept in mind by candidates and by political formations, despite a progressive awareness of these actors.
In particular the CNIL has detected a lack of transparency in terms of propaganda and discontent among contacted people.
Main rules that need to be followed
As a response to those breaches, the CNIL remembers the following rules:
- candidates are kept to adequately inform recipients of their political prospection messages. For this reason, the origin of data used in order to flatter an elector shall be specified in particular to those last one when data are not directly recollected by him
- file can be used for political communication purposes they shall be in compliance with personal data protection legislation (in particular compared to the purpose/s of the relevant file, the relevance of the recollected information, the storage retention time of data and their confidentiality and security.
- Wherever is the way of communication used, people contacted shall exercise their rights (in particular the right to object) in the easiest way: those requests shall be processed as soon as possible, and within a month.
The repressive action of the CNIL
The CNIL shall carry out also controls on after reports, complaints or event on their initiative.
In occasion of their previous elections, in front of the most serious deficiencies, it has organized five controls to different candidates who have been formally recalled for their obligations.
The action plan of the CNIL in order to protect people’s rights
In order to support candidates and political groups and guarantee that rights of people are taken into account, the CNIL is implementing a global action plan around different initiative, in particular:
- The provision of contents on the political communications and in particular on elector’s rights
- Advice provided to candidates and political parties in order to help them and implement good practices.
- The open of a platform of reports which permit to alert the CNIL on practices which could result not in compliance and that permit to adopt necessary measures for interested actors (controls, corrective measures, complainants to the Public Prosecutor’s Office).
SOURCE: AUTORITA’ PER LA PROTEZIONE DEI DATI DELLA FRANCIA – CNIL