Google Gets Into Politics With Civic Info API 58
mikejuk writes "The new Google Civic Information API can be used to look up comprehensive voting information for particular addresses in the U.S. such as the polling place, early vote sites, contests, and local election official contact information. At the moment the API is limited to voting information for elections in the U.S., but Google plans to expand the support to cover other countries and include other types of civic information. Google plans to use the API to power their own election tools, including an embeddable app anyone can use on their site."
Re:anyone can use on their site... (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't just make shit up.
Re:anyone can use on their site... (Score:4, Insightful)
The type of company Google is is 115% irrelevant to the point made by the FP.
Thanks for participating.
Beware third Parties (Score:4, Insightful)
I would not be surprised to see nominally politically neutral third party apps built on top of this interface that try to figure out what party you are likely to vote for via cross-referencing with various Big Data providers like BlueKai or Axciom and then, depending on which party commissioned the app, lying about polling place info (location, times, etc) or some other sort of dirty trick to discourage you from voting.
A smart "political hack" would only show the bad information a couple of times, so as to make it harder to prove that anything nefarious had gone on.