Notes

Personal Information of Nearly 200 million uS Citizens Exposed

Personal details of nearly 200 million US citizens are exposed



19 June 2017



A marketing firm hired by Republican National Committee accidentally exposed sensitive personal details of nearly 200 million US citizens.



The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers , and political views of more than 62% of the entire US population.



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



Anyone can access the information provided they have access to.



Political biases exposed



The huge cache of data was discovered last week by Chris Vickery, a cyber-risk analyst at security firm UpGuard. The information is believed to have come from multiple sources, including posts on controversial threads on Reddit and committees that have raised funds to aid the Republican Party.



The information was stored in spreadsheets uploaded to a server run by Deep Root Analytics. It had last been updated in January when President Donald Trump was inaugurated and was available for an unknown period of time.



"We take full responsibility for this issue. Based on the information we have discovered so far, we don't believe that our systems have been hacked," Deep Root Analytics' founder Alex Lundry told technology website Gizmodo.



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



Apart from personal details In addition, the data contained people's suspected religious affiliations, ethnicities and political preferences like the opinions they held on controversial topics such as gun control and the right to abortion and stem cell research.



The names of the directories and file names indicated that the data was designed to be used by powerful Republican political organizations. The idea was to build a an image of as many voters as possible with all available data. Certain fields were left blank in the event that there was no response.



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



"The capability to collect this data and securely store it also raises questions about the obligations owed by private corporations and political campaigns to people who are targeted by ever-higher-powered data analytics operations."



Privacy concerns



Although it is known that political parties regularly collect data on voters, this is the largest breach of electoral data in the US to date and privacy experts are concerned about the sheer magnitude of the data collected.



"This is a major concern. This isn't sensitive information. It's intimate information, predictions and assumptions about people's behaviour that people 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 function in the same manner.



It poses a threat to the way democracy works. The GOP [Republican Party] relied on publicly-collected, commercially-provided information. It was not known that the information they provided to one company would end up in a database that was used to target them politically.



Ms Kaltheuner said, "You should be in charge of what happens with your data, who has the right to access it and for what purpose."



There are fears that leaks of data could be used to perpetrate identity fraud, harass people under protection orders, or intimidate people who hold opposing opinions.
Grn online


"The potential for this type of data being made public and the dark web is extremely high," Paul Fletcher (a cyber-security evangelist at security company Alert Logic) told the BBC.



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