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Personal Details of Nearly 200 million uS Citizens Exposed

Personal information of more than 200 million US citizens exposed



19 June 2017



Personal details of sensitive individuals pertaining to almost 200 million US citizens were accidentally disclosed by a company that was contracted by the Republican National Committee.



The 1.1 Terabytes of data include birthdates, home addresses, phone numbers, and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population.
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The data was accessible on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server.



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



Political biases exposed



Chris Vickery, a cyber risk analyst at security firm UpGuard, discovered the massive collection of data last week. The data appears to have been collected from a wide range of sources - from posts on controversial threads that are banned on the social network Reddit to committees that raised funds for the Republican Party.



Deep Root Analytics stored the data in spreadsheets that were uploaded to a server. It was last updated in January 2017, the month that President Donald Trump was inaugurated. It had been online for a period of unknown time.



"We are fully responsible for this incident. Based on the information we have to date, we don't believe our systems were compromised," Alex Lundry, the founder of Deep Root Analytics, told the technology website Gizmodo.



"Since this incident has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and implemented protocols to prevent further access."



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



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



"That such a huge national database could be built, and hosted online, without even the most basic safeguards against the data becoming public accessible is troubling," Dan O'Sullivan wrote on Upguard's blog.



"The ability to gather this data and then store it in a secure way raises questions about the obligations of private corporations and political campaign to those citizens who are targeted by increasingly sophisticated data analytics operations."



Privacy concerns



While it is widely known that political parties regularly collect voter data however, this is the largest data breach of electoral data in the US. Privacy experts are worried by the volume of data.



"This is a major concern. This isn't only sensitive, it's personal information that can be used to predict people's behavior as well as opinions and convictions that people haven't decided to share with anyone," Privacy International's policy officer Frederike Kaltheuner told the BBC News website.



However, the issue of data collection and the use of computer models to predict the behavior of voters is not just limited to marketers The organization Privacy International says that the entire online advertising ecosystem operates in the same way.



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



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



There are concerns that leaked information could be used to be used to commit identity fraud, harass people with protection orders, or intimidate people with opposing opinions.



"The potential for such type of data being made public and the dark web is very high," Paul Fletcher (a cybersecurity evangelist at security firm Alert Logic) told the BBC.



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