Sure, everyone was impressed by how 21st century this election has become: Those CNN undecided voter squiggle lines, to those amazing "magic" electoral maps, and perhaps the most impressive feat of all, Barack Obama's promise to text his VP choice to interested citizens, landing him the largest bank of volunteered cell phone numbers in history.

But in describing how great it is that Barack Obama has harnessed the power of new technology for his campaign, Slate's Farhad Manjoo inadvertently brings up an unasked question: Why are you giving Obama anytime access to your free text minutes?

This is especially true when the message seems to have been tailored to you specifically—Obama's often are. The campaign knows a lot about me: At the least, it knows that I live in California, and because I joined the text-message list in order to learn the V.P. pick, that I'm fairly interested in politics (and therefore likely to vote). It's possible that they might know even more; given my ZIP code and my phone number, they could potentially have tied my text-message account to my voter registration file, allowing the campaign to send me messages based on my party registration, whether I usually vote by mail, and whether I sometimes forget to vote. (It doesn't appear that the campaign knows what's in my registration file, though; I'm registered as a permanent absentee voter, but the campaign hasn't asked me to mail in my ballot yet.)

Wow, the Obama campaign knows — or is capable of knowing — all of that about you? Imagine, for a moment, that we were talking about an advertiser marketing agency, who bundled together all these intimate details about you when you applied for a credit card, entered a sweepstakes, or signed up for a Duane Read card. In those instances, privacy rights organizations are up in arms. But when it's Obama playing Big Brother? Our personal information is somehow considered less sacrosanct.

So why is it different when a politician uses your information to compile a voter registration file? Sure, you volunteered your phone number, but for a reason: so you could get first-hand information about the campaign. There was no TXT informing anybody their numbers would be pooled, possibly matched against other data, and put together into a profile more comprehensive than anything Facebook has ever done.

Not that we're saying what Obama's camp did was a bad idea (it wasn't!) or unethical (not yet!). In fact, if the Democrat wins, the pervasiveness of Obama's technology play (text messaging) over McCain's (robo-call smears) could very well go down as one of the largest indicators of campaign success.

But then remember that all the text messages that put Obama in the White House means the president of the United States knows how to bug you at 3am.