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Personal Details of Nearly 200 Million US Citizens Exposed

posted by n1 on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the nefarious-purposes dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server.

The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.

Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.

[...] In a statement, Deep Root founder Alex Lundry told Gizmodo, “We take full responsibility for this situation.” He said the data included proprietary information as well as publicly available voter data provided by state government officials. “Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access,” Lundry said.

Source: Gizmodo

Additional coverage: BBC News, CNET, Mashable

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by Fluffeh on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:19AM (1 child)

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:19AM (#528341) Journal

    I believe "responsibility" means the company will cease to exist in the super near future. All people will be let go and it will be no more.

    In a completely unrelated matter, a similar company (sans any pesky accountability and or responsibility) will form and amazingly employ just about all the same people in all the positions of any power.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:05PM (#528473)

    Is this republican "way" better or worse than the democrat's "blame the russians"? I don't know, it seems less damaging on the face of it...