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Georgia Gives Personal Data of 6 Million Voters To Georgia GunOwner Magazine (ajc.com)
McGruber writes: A class action lawsuit alleges that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp's office released the personal identifying information of Georgia voters to twelve organizations, "including statewide political parties, news media organizations and Georgia GunOwner Magazine".
According to Kemp, his office shares "voter registration data every month with news media and political parties that have requested it as required by Georgia law. Due to a clerical error where information was put in the wrong file, 12 recipients received a disc that contained personal identifying information that should not have been included."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution independently confirmed the inclusion of the personal data in the October file. The AJC did so by accessing the October data disc, looking up information for an AJC staffer and confirming his Social Security number and driver's license information was included. The AJC has returned its copy of the disc to the state.
According to Kemp, his office shares "voter registration data every month with news media and political parties that have requested it as required by Georgia law. Due to a clerical error where information was put in the wrong file, 12 recipients received a disc that contained personal identifying information that should not have been included."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution independently confirmed the inclusion of the personal data in the October file. The AJC did so by accessing the October data disc, looking up information for an AJC staffer and confirming his Social Security number and driver's license information was included. The AJC has returned its copy of the disc to the state.
There were 12 organizations which received the info, which included some mistakenly provided personal info.
Singling out one organization in the headline seems to make this story a politically driven one.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
OK, so, is Slashdot a tech-news page or just trying to be Gawker?
The story here is that personally-identifying information was sent to 12 organizations. One of those organizations was a gun magazine (because they were one of the 12 that requested the info).
Editor 101 quiz, which of these headlines is more informative, and which is just polemic clickbait:
"Georgia Gives Personal Data of 6 Million Voters To Georgia GunOwner Magazine"
or
"Georgia Gives Personal Data of 6 Million Voters To 12 Organizations"
?
If we're going to go the polemic route, why not just go all the way? The Governor of GA is a Republican, you could instead re-title this:
"Republican Governor's office hands citizen data to Gun Magazine"?
-Styopa
When you want clicks and ad revenue, you relate what you are talking about with something very controversial and that has passions running very high on either end of the debat - blind rage, actually.
Guns have become one of those issues. Add in guns owners paranoia that their guns are honing to be confiscated by the government, we have here an attempt to garner quite a bit of outrage from the anti-government gun owner crowd.
It's a cheap trick but the public gets suckered every time.
Fixed your headline for you.
I am certainly not a gun-nut, but it seems that the magazine in the headline has no more blame in this matter than the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Careful what you ask for, you might get timothy.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law