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Personal Details of Nearly 200 million uS Citizens Exposed

Personal details of nearly 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.



About 62% of the US population has access to this 1.1 terabytes worth of data. This includes their birth dates address, home addresses, as well as phone numbers.



The data was accessible via a publically accessible Amazon cloud server.



Anybody can access the data provided they have a link.



Political biases exposed



Chris Vickery, a cyber risk analyst at security firm UpGuard, discovered the massive amount of data that was discovered this week. The data appears to have been gathered from a variety of sources including posts on controversial threads on Reddit and committees that raised funds to support the Republican Party.



The information was stored in spreadsheets and 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 available for a period of unknown time.



"We fully accept responsibility for this. Based on the information we've gathered thus far, we don't believe that our systems have been compromised," Deep Root Analytics founder Alex Lundry told technology website Gizmodo.



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



In addition to personal information, the information contained details about the citizens' religion and ethnic affiliations as well as political biases. This included where they stand on controversial topics like gun control, abortion rights and stem cell research.



The names of the directories and file names indicated that the information was designed to be utilized by powerful Republican political organizations. The idea was to build a an accurate profile of the largest number of voters using all the data available. Some fields were left blank if there was no answer.



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



"The capability to collect such data and then store it in a secure way further questions the responsibilities of private corporations and campaigns for political power to those targeted with increasingly massive data analytics operations."



Privacy concerns



Although it is widely known that political parties routinely collect information on voters but this is the biggest data breach of electoral data in the US. Privacy experts are concerned about the sheer volume of the data.



"This is deeply troubling. This isn't sensitive information. It's private information, predictions and assumptions about people's behavior that people have never made public to anyone," Frederike Kaltheuner, Privacy International's policy officer, told BBC News.



Privacy International states that all online advertising platforms function in the same way.



"It is an attack on the way democracy works. The GOP [Republican Party] relied on publicly-collected, commercially-provided information. No one would have known that the data they entrusted to one organisation would end in a database that was used to target them politically.



"You should be in control of what is happening to your personal data and who has access to it and for what purposes," Ms Kaltheuner added.



There are concerns that leaked data could be used to perpetrate identity fraud, harass people with protection orders, or to intimidate those who have different opinions.
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"The potential for this kind of data being available to the public on the dark web is very high," Paul Fletcher, a cyber-security evangelist at security firm Alert Logic told the BBC.



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