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Personal Information of Nearly 200 million uS Citizens Exposed

Personal details of over 200 million US citizens exposed



19 June 2017



A marketing firm hired by Republican National Committee accidentally exposed private information of nearly 200 million US citizens.



Nearly 62% of the US population has access to this 1.1 Terabytes worth of information. This includes their birth dates, home addresses, and telephone numbers.



The data was accessible on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server.



Anyone can access the information provided they have a link.



Political biases exposed



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



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



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



"Since we learned of this event, we have modified our access settings and implemented protocols to block access to further events."



Other than personal information, the information contained information on the citizens' religious and ethnic affiliations and political beliefs. This included information about where they stand on controversial issues such as abortion rights, gun control and stem cell research.



The names of the directories and file names indicated that the information was intended to be used by powerful Republican political groups. The goal was to create an image of as many voters as was possible using all the available data. Some fields were left blank when there was no response.



"That such a massive national database could be created and hosted online, missing even the most basic of safeguards against the data being publically accessible, is alarming," Dan O'Sullivan wrote in a blog entry on Upguard's website.



"The capability to gather such information and then store it in a secure manner also raises questions about the obligations of private corporations and political campaigns to those individuals targeted by the increasingly powerful data analytics operations."



Privacy concerns



While it is well-known that political parties routinely gather information about voters, this is the largest data breach in the electoral system in the US to date. Privacy experts are concerned by the magnitude of the data collected.



"This is deeply troubling. Wow Servers This is not just sensitive, it's intimate information and predictions about 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 using computer models to predict voter behavior isn't just restricted to companies that market - Privacy International says that the entire online advertising ecosystem is governed in the same manner.



"It is an affront to the way democracy functions. The GOP [Republican Party] relied on publicly-collected, commercially-provided information. It was not known that the data they entrusted to one organization would end up in a database used to identify them politically.



Ms Kaltheuner said, "You should be in control of what happens to your data, who can access it, and for what purpose."



There are fears that leaked information could be used for criminal purposes, from identity fraud to harassment of people under protection orders or to intimidate those who hold an opposing political stance.



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



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