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Presidential Campaigns Leak Supporters' Info To Tracking Firms

Posted by timothy on from the incompetence-or-incontinence dept.

Peter Eckersley writes "Stanford privacy researcher Jonathan Mayer has published new research showing that websites of both the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns, which are used to communicate with and coordinate their volunteers, leak large amounts of private information to third-party online tracking firms. The Obama campaign site leaked names, usernames, zip codes and street addresses to up to ten companies. The Romney campaign site leaked names, zip codes and partial email addresses to up to thirteen firms."

4 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Leak? by amicusNYCL · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's not so much a "leak", and more of a "take this". They probably even get paid for it.

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    1. Re:Leak? by postbigbang · · Score: 4, Interesting

      One side of me says:

      Prosecute the fuckers, no matter who they are.

      The other, more dark side says:

      Same old stuff, different day.

      --
      ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
  2. There oughtta be a law... by msauve · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but, considering that congresscritters exempted themselves from the Do Not Call phone list, it will never happen. We don't have a representative government, but one made of people who think they're better than those they supposedly represent.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  3. Not real "leaking" by Coolhand2120 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This isn't leaking in the traditional since that someone is giving databases of information to 3rd parties. The leaking going on here has to do with GET requests to their respective web sites containing identifying information in the URL. This is probably unintentional and may not even be occurring at all since a lot of the pages use SSL and the URLs are encrypted. Of course internal analytic software can (and probably does) retain the URLs, but that's hardly "leaking" information to 3rd parties. If I was using a pay-for analytics suite and found that the people I'm paying were looking at my private information (tracking data) I would be pretty pissed off and might even consider legal action.

    TLDR: No "leaking" going on here. The headline does not match the content of the article.