Deutsche Post has denied allegations of having sold client microtargeting data to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) ahead of the 2017 election campaign, Deutsche Welle reported.
A representative of the company's subsidiary, Deutsche Post Direkt GmbH, assured the public that it had never sold details of addresses or individual households and dealt with personal data in strict compliance with the Federal Data Protection Act.
The data which the company offered to its clients was completely anonymized and didn't contain any personal references, the spokesperson argued.
The CDU and FDP confirmed that they had purchased data from the company during the election campaign, but said they had acted in accordance with the data protection law.
Both parties stated that they had used the information that only indicated the probability of where they could find potential supporters and that this data didn't contain any concrete addresses or other personal details.
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Earlier, German newspaper Bild reported that each party had spent "five-figure sums" to receive the detailed personal data of potential voters that was supposed to help the politicians with their door-to-door campaign.
The practice of acquiring information to customize election campaigns is quite common, but microtargeting, in which data is collected to target individuals, has serious limits in Germany due to strict EU privacy rules.
