Political parties and personal data protection, a European issue.

The European Union and the member states have shown a growing concern for the protection of citizens' personal data, as evidenced by the approval, in 2016, of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Directive on data protection in the criminal field and the implementation of the The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), as of 2018. These efforts to preserve privacy are added to those of national authorities such as the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés of France, the BfDI of Germany or the AEPD of Spain. For their part, political parties have shown a great ambition to collect abundant information on affiliates, supporters and voters to encourage or demobilize, both during electoral campaigns and for their daily operations. Considering that personal information of an ideological and partisan nature is particularly sensitive, there is tension between governments, independent authorities and political parties, as the scandals related to the activities of the company Cambridge Analytica have shown. Of course, we pay special attention to the enormous exposure of personal data that has favored the digital revolution and to the information storage and analysis capacity offered by big data. In this paper we offer an overview of the relationship between political parties and data protection throughout Europe, focusing on the legal framework, the behavior of political parties and the sanctions imposed by data protection agencies to the parties in malpractice cases. In short, the main objective of the research is to identify and classify the most problematic aspects of the activity of political parties in relation to the protection of personal data of European citizens and to establish possible lines of work to improve research in the field as well how to develop an agenda of public policies for improvement that define the appropriate procedure of political parties with respect to data of a partisan and ideological nature.