{"id":315446,"date":"2019-05-07T11:34:39","date_gmt":"2019-05-07T09:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=315446"},"modified":"2019-05-07T12:05:25","modified_gmt":"2019-05-07T10:05:25","slug":"political-phone-calls-are-annoying-invasive-and-dont-work-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/technology\/315446\/political-phone-calls-are-annoying-invasive-and-dont-work-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Political phone calls are annoying, invasive and don’t work: study"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new study<\/a><\/strong> published by Daniel Maduku, a lecturer in marketing management at the University of Johannesburg, shows that South Africans are getting annoyed by political parties that constantly phone and message them – and are worried that they are breaching their digital privacy.<\/p>\n

The study, which was based on a survey of 971 people in Gauteng, asked respondents to evaluate their perceptions of online and mobile political marketing campaigns.<\/p>\n

In a post on The Conversation<\/a><\/strong> explaining the study, Maduku said that he wanted to know, on a sliding scale and if at all, how much they felt these campaigns threatened their digital privacy and how much that perception influenced their acceptance of this form of political communication.<\/p>\n

The findings showed that South African voters felt that mobile political campaigns were intrusive, violated their privacy and made them feel disillusioned with the political process.<\/p>\n

“The participants were concerned that political campaigns directed at them via their mobile devices threatened their digital privacy,” he said.<\/p>\n

“They worried that political parties were able to track their mobile web browsing preferences and behaviour through the use of cookies.<\/p>\n

“They also feared that malicious programmes could be used to infiltrate their mobile accounts and obtain their personal information for future political campaigns.”<\/p>\n

While Maduku said that there is no evidence that political parties are engaging in illegal activities, he said that it is interesting that there is this perception and fear.<\/p>\n

Another finding was that voters highly value and desire their privacy, he said.<\/p>\n

“This means they view the collection of their personal information \u2013 such as their cell phone numbers \u2013 by political parties as highly invasive,” he said.<\/p>\n

“They became irritated when they received unsolicited political messages. So the messages had the opposite of the desired effect: they created apathy towards the political party in question.”<\/p>\n

Maduku said that mobile political campaigns also often failed to get their message across<\/strong> as respondents found the messages exaggerated and confusing.<\/p>\n

“Political parties should take heed of people\u2019s concerns and complaints about this method, and adapt their approach accordingly,” he said.<\/p>\n

“If voters feel their privacy concerns are being respected and they have a choice to ‘opt in’, they are more likely to engage.”<\/p>\n

\n

Read: Helen Zille rated as the best premier in South Africa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new study published by Daniel Maduku, a lecturer in marketing management at the University of Johannesburg, shows that South Africans are frustrated by political parties that constantly phone and message them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":249547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9878],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-315446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315446"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315510,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315446\/revisions\/315510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}