So you click the link

It’s a survey request from your local politician.

With a link to a fairly bland domain name. Seems pretty innocuous. It’s the usual round robin of tepid self-serving questions about reducing cost-of-living pressure, reducing migration to ease housing, reducing tax burden, boosting defense, strengthening the economy.

Policy masquerading as questions in a market research masquerading as a survey. It’s the usual political nonsense that passes for community engagement with a veneer of concern and consultation. The same headshot of the politician is used twice. It’s the same headshot the politician has been using for almost a decade.

You tick the boxes and answer the questions. It’s not until you get to the personal details that you do a double-take.

There are red asterisks on the fields for First name, Surname, Address, Suburb, Postcode, Phone and Email. If you don’t fill in all the details, you can’t complete the survey. You can’t have your say.

Your entire political concerns and voting bias in one digital file. Including your First name, Surname, Address, Suburb, Postcode, Phone and Email. All in one little packet of data.

So you open the inspector pane on your browser and scan through the code. The bland domain name is just a front for SurveyMonkey. Which sounds innocent and playful until you check and see that SurveyMonkey nowadays deploys more than 3.5 million surveys a year. That’s a lot of personal information.

You also see it’s no longer being run by founder Ryan Finley after he sold his share to private equity in 2009. It’s been bundled and unbundled and rebundled multiple times since then. Hanged, drawn and quartered by numerous private equity firms doing what they do best.

Its latest acquisition was by Symphony Technology Group (STG), a private equity firm, in a $1.5 billion all-cash transaction in May 2023. Any personal political data you enter will be for sale to the highest bidder sooner than later. How else do you think they’re going to pay for the acquisition?

It’s surveillance capitalism masked as democracy. All hustled and sold by a U.S. private equity group that pays no tax in Australia. As a private equity firm, STG operates as a “flow-through” entity. This means corporate-level taxes are not paid by the firm itself. Instead, the tax liabilities are passed through to the firm’s individual investors and partners and managed accordingly.

It’s time our politicians stopped selling Australians short to foreign interests. Time to hold U.S. tech companies accountable.

Not just tax them but regulate them to our advantage, not theirs.