Farage’s Reform is collecting your data: here’s why

In the run-up to the 2024 general election, thousands of voters asked a simple question: “What are political parties doing with my personal data?”

While most parties played by the rules, Reform UK took a different path. They weren’t just late answering these questions, they ignored them. Until we threatened them with legal action.

Now, as we take Reform to the High Court tomorrow, it’s time we asked the question: why are they doing this?

Reform is very open about their goals. Their own privacy policy is clear as day: they want to “create and maintain a profile for every registered voter in the UK”. Not just Reform voters, every voter – and that means you. With the party putting together policies for a future government modelled on ICE in America, that’s a very scary prospect.

Reform has also used a powerful software tool called NationBuilder. That tool can be used to do something called micro-targeting, by scraping social media and commercial databases and building deep profiles of voters. Companies can stalk your internet existence – your Facebook posts, your shopping, your YouTube habit – and then use all that information to stoke division and hate.

Reform say they want to profile millions of people, and then ignore them when they ask to see their data. We’re going to court with 51 of the people who Reform ignored and then denied holding data on. You have a right to know what data Reform has on you, and they have a duty to respond.

This isn’t just about a few late emails. It’s about democratic accountability, and a party that is clearly overstepping.

When a party’s answers don’t add up, it’s usually because they’re hiding something. And we intend to find out exactly what is going on.