198 Million Americans Hit By 'Largest Ever' Voter Records Leak (zdnet.com)

Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server, reports say. From a ZDNet article: It's believed to be the largest ever known exposure of voter information to date. The various databases containing 198 million records on American voters from all political parties were found stored on an open Amazon S3 storage server owned by a Republican data analytics firm, Deep Root Analytics. UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery, who found the exposed server, verified the data. Through his responsible disclosure, the server was secured late last week, and prior to publication. This leak shines a spotlight on the Republicans' multi-million dollar effort to better target potential voters by utilizing big data. The move largely a response to the successes of the Barack Obama campaign in 2008, thought to have been the first data-driven campaign. Further reading: Republican Data-Mining Firm Exposed Personal Information for Virtually Every American Voter - The Intercept; The RNC Files: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak - Upguard; Data on 198M voters exposed by GOP contractor Data On 198M Voters Exposed By GOP Contractor - The Hill.

Comments

Voter records are public

[GrEp]

Commonly referred to as the "VAN", State voter participation records, even for party primaries/caucus, are a matter of public record. Who you voted for may be confidential, but that you showed up and voted isn't.

Larger political organizations go the extra mile to annotate these records and aggregate them. They even have door to door pollsters that go around to those who have voted recently and target them with polling questions.

IMHO it is a good thing this is open to the wider public, and not just in the hands of a few with the deep pockets to aggregate it.

Re: "Leak"

[ShanghaiBill]

According to TFA, the "leaked" data contained much more than just public data. It contained info on religion, political persuasions, issues that you care about, etc. TFA doesn't say where that info came from, but most likely from donation records, social media scraping, and on-line tracking.

As far as we know, the data was temporarily exposed, but wasn't actually leaked, and is not publicly available. That is too bad. I would be really curious to see what they think of me.

Re:Multi Million$$

[squiggleslash]

Please do tell, oh victimized conservative, how calling the Republican effort "multi-million" and not, this time, calling the Democratic equivalent the same label, although it has been done many, many, times before, is somehow harmful to Republicans.

Is someone seriously not going to vote Republican because they heard they spent millions of dollars on a part of their campaign? Is someone seriously going to think the Democrats don't?