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
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @07:23AM (9 children)
Name, Address, Phone Number
Back in the day, that was public information anyone could find in something we called a Phone Book.
Kids these days with their instantcheckmate think of a public records search as a doxxing.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:16AM (2 children)
Apparently most of the information is "public" information. But you know what: that doesn't matter - it's still sensitive.
Your movements on the public streets occur in the public view. Still, if i hire someone to follow you, or graze security cameras, I can put together an entire profile: where you shop, what restaurants you frequent, who your friends are, etc.. All the individual bits are public information, but putting all the pieces together yields a different beast altogether. I don't know about the US, but in Europe this would be a privacy violation, and hence (IANAL) illegal.
Put the pieces together on 200 million people in one handy database? That's yet again another creature, seeing as that is essentially the entire body of registered voters in the country. On top of any legal issues, that data is financially valuable, because gathering and cleaning that much data must have been a huge undertaking.
Full responsibility? Sepuku is about right. Unfortunately, as other posters have noted, nothing at all will happen. This company is the very definition of "politically well connected".
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by KGIII on Tuesday June 20 2017, @02:54PM (1 child)
I used to have clearance, and we underwent some rather pedantic training. This sort of reminds me of that.
See, you can have several pieces of information that are, by themselves, not considered classified. But, in aggregate, they are a new animal and that may be classified.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @01:18AM
That isn't pedantic, that is practical. Now if only the US would embrace this fact and implement privacy laws like Europe. Except better, because the US can't stand Europe being better at anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:29AM
Frankly, those things should not be public record to begin with, especially not in the digital age where it's so easy to get it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @09:30AM (1 child)
The difference is that, at least in Germany, you can decide yourself if you want to be listed in the phone book. Sure, it's the default, but if you don't want to be listed, you can say so when getting your phone contract, and you'll not be listed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @02:23PM
In the US you can pay to not be listed.
But this leak is likely to be made up from the voter registration lists, which are generally freely available. For example the list in this area includes party affiliation, address, birth date, and voting history (yes/no). It's a given that the established parties have compiled complete national lists derived from the government lists. Same with other orgs like marketers and detective agencies.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @10:18AM (2 children)
Name, address, birth dates, and phone numbers for a large number of people can be a good start. Add in the political views, and you may have a way to harass or harm people in your area.
There seems to be no certainty that this info is actually out in the wild. That's what kills this story.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @02:22PM (1 child)
I haven't seen it firsthand, but someone on an IRC channel claimed it was out there and was going to see about mirroring the torrent to more public trackers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:17PM
Be careful. Could be a honeypot, malware, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]