Notes

Personal Details of Nearly 200 million uS Citizens Declassified

Personal information of more than 200 million US citizens was exposed



19 June 2017



Personal information of nearly 200 million US citizens were accidentally disclosed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee.



The 1.1 trillion terabytes of information includes birth dates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population.



The data was available through a public-access Amazon cloud server.



Anyone could access the information as long they had a connection to it.



Political biases exposed



Chris Vickery, a cyber risk analyst at security firm UpGuard who discovered the massive collection of data last week. The information is believed to have come from multiple sources such as posts on controversial threads on Reddit and committees that have raised funds to help the Republican Party.



The information was stored in spreadsheets and uploaded to a server run by Deep Root Analytics. The last time it was updated was January 2017, the month that President Donald Trump was inaugurated. Server list It had been online for an unknown amount of time.



"We take full responsibility for this. Based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been breached," Deep Root Analytics' founder Alex Lundry told technology website Gizmodo.



"Since this incident has come to our attention, we have changed the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent access."



Apart from personal information, the information contained information on the citizens' religious and ethnic backgrounds as well as political beliefs. This included where they stand on controversial topics such as abortion rights, gun control, and stem cell research.



The file names and directories indicated that the data was meant to be used by influential Republican political groups. The idea was to build a an image of as many voters as possible with all available data. Some fields were left blank when there was no response.



"That such a massive national database could be created and hosted online, without even the simplest of protections against data being made publicly accessible, is alarming," Dan O'Sullivan wrote in a blog entry on the website of Upguard.



"The ability to collect such information and then store it in a secure manner is a further challenge to the obligations of private corporations and political campaigns to individuals targeted by the increasingly powerful data analytics operations."



Privacy concerns



Although it is widely known that political parties regularly collect information on voters however, this is the largest data breach of electoral data in the US. Privacy experts are concerned by the sheer volume of the data.



"This is deeply troubling. This is not sensitive information. It's personal knowledge, predictions, and beliefs about the behavior of people that they have not made public to anyone," Frederike Kaltheuner, Privacy International's policy manager, said to BBC News.



Privacy International states that all online advertising platforms operate in the same manner.



"It is a threat to the way democracy works. The GOP [Republican Party] relied on publicly-collected, commercially-provided information. No one would have imagined that the data they gave to one organization would end in a database that was used to identify them politically.



"You must be in charge of what happens to your information and who has access to it and for what purposes," Ms Kaltheuner added.



There are fears that leaks of information could be used to be used to commit identity fraud, harass individuals under protection orders, or even intimidate those who have opposing views.



"The potential for this type of information being made available publicly and on the dark web is extremely high," Paul Fletcher, an evangelist for cyber-security at security firm Alert Logic told the BBC.



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