Largest Ever Data Leak: Huge Trove of American Voter Personal Data Leaked - Records of 198 Million Citizens

in #bigdata7 years ago

A massive leak of voter data and personal information has been leaked from an unsecured Amazon server.


The data leak originates from an Amazon S3 cloud server used by Republican firm Deep Root Analytics.


The Amazon S3 Cloud & Deep Root Analytics data leak:

Largest data leak in history

198 million records

Voter data

Personal information

Voter profiling


Source: Zdnet

The voter data includes information about voters from both major parties, Democrats and Republicans, though the data belonged to Deep Root Analytics a Republican Anlatics firm. The company created the database in an effort to emulate the data driven campaign of Barack Obama in 2008.

Among the data that was leaked, Data Trust a sort of data depository of the GOP, had their information exposed. The firm sells voter data to politicians who use the information to shape their campaigns and political advertising.

The information contains voter profiles and the data can be used to predict how an individual is likely to vote in the future.


Data & Details

It is almost impossible to estimate how damaging this leak is.

Each record lists a voter's name, date of birth, home address, phone number, and voter registration details, such as which political party a person is registered with. The data also includes "profiling" information, voter ethnicities and religions, and various other kinds of information pertinent to a voter's political persuasions and preferences, as modeled by the firms' data scientists, in order to better target political advertising.


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Implications


Though Deep Root Analytics has taken 'full responsibility' for the leak, they maintain that there's no evidence that their system had been hacked.

What should we conclude from all this?

Is Deep Root Analytics admitting that they were negligent with safeguarding voter data?

If the company wasn't hacked then it would appear that there's a flaw in their security systems or protocols.

This leak demonstrates an uncomfortable reality that surrounds us all in the digital age in having almost 200 million people had their personal information and voter 'profiles' exposed.

Your Data, your personal profile, your information...Doesn't belong to you.

People certainly did not consent to have their information stored on the cloud in the first place, nevertheless it's there.


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Sorry for those affected. I'm very glad I withdrew from the voting system long ago.

If you haven't been in the voting system for 10 years, you're probably good;)

Lol, I think I have not voted for maybe 20 years..

LOL, noice

Hi--I am from san diego, the city is thinking about spending 5 million dollars on a special election for a soccer stadium. Jamesc1 would it be possible to design a blockchain app for voting in local elections, say for under 500,000 dollars?

Well another great reason to start adopting blockchain technology!

198 million, puff
Everyday it's getting scarier.
I hope Blockchain could be a powerful solution to stop these kind of hacks.

Not good once again. Hurry to help, blockchain.

This post received a 2.3% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @v4vapid! For more information, click here!

It's too bad that so many people go to vote, thinking that it makes a difference. The results of sending sell-outs to D.C. in '10, '12, '14 and '16 should convince all of us that it's a sham.