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Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

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Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#111

Post by ganoushoreilly »

remline wrote: post #75
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #47

As long as the CEO of an company (RNC) that gives data to an outsourcer (Deep Root Analytics) is not going to jail to give data to an unqualified company, nothing will change. If the CEO goes to jail, things will change very rapidly (CEO will manage his CMO much tighter who will first want to see an security audit not older than 6 months). At least CEOs I have reported to as CTO were very sensitive for implemention i…

If this data has private information on non-republicans then jail them for having it, not for leaking it. There is no special purpose in these two groups of colluding Americans that grants them special rights to gather data on their non-associates any differently than any other member of the public.

If they are gathering data through any means it's no different than other marketing firms. I think the real debate needs to be about what any companies can share.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#112

Post by ganoushoreilly »

remline wrote: post #75
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #47

As long as the CEO of an company (RNC) that gives data to an outsourcer (Deep Root Analytics) is not going to jail to give data to an unqualified company, nothing will change. If the CEO goes to jail, things will change very rapidly (CEO will manage his CMO much tighter who will first want to see an security audit not older than 6 months). At least CEOs I have reported to as CTO were very sensitive for implemention i…

If this data has private information on non-republicans then jail them for having it, not for leaking it. There is no special purpose in these two groups of colluding Americans that grants them special rights to gather data on their non-associates any differently than any other member of the public.

If they are gathering data through any means it's no different than other marketing firms. I think the real debate needs to be about what any companies can share.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#113

Post by pmyteh »

creepydata wrote: post #95
arianvanp wrote: post #23

So you think it is okay to model ethnicity and religion of 200 milion citizens? This is how my country got all their jews killed in WWII [0]. The mere thought of compiling such information here would lead to some hefty jail time these days. I really cannot believe you can even defend such a thing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_registration#Netherlands

Woah. Why don't you calm down and read the comment you are replying to. The comment you were replying to wasn't taking a position on the issue, and certainly not a strong one, merely asking questions. >The mere thought of compiling such information here would lead to some hefty jail time these days. No, not in the United States it wouldn't. Not only is it not illegal, it's standard practice by marking companies, data…

"Here" in GP's comment is stated as being The Netherlands. Europe does in general have stricter data protection laws than the US, though I don't know them well enough to know which bits of this leak would be illegal here. Allowing the leak itself would be, at least under UK law.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#115

Post by nothis »

azinman2 wrote: post #101
apeace wrote: post #63

> Spreadsheets containing this accumulated data—last updated around the January 2017 presidential inauguration—constitute a treasure trove of political data and modeled preferences used by the Trump campaign Genuinely curious: can you really have 198 million rows in a spreadsheet?

It’s provably a CSV not meant to be used by excel.

Correct:

>Each file, formatted as a comma separated value (.csv), lists an internal, 32-character alphanumeric “RNC ID”—such as, for example, 530C2598-6EF4-4A56-9A7X-2FCA466FX2E2—used to uniquely identify every potential voter in the database.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#116

Post by creepydata »

pmyteh wrote: post #113
creepydata wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah. Why don't you calm down and read the comment you are replying to. The comment you were replying to wasn't taking a position on the issue, and certainly not a strong one, merely asking questions. >The mere thought of compiling such information here would lead to some hefty jail time these days. No, not in the United States it wouldn't. Not only is it not illegal, it's standard practice by marking companies, data…

"Here" in GP's comment is stated as being The Netherlands. Europe does in general have stricter data protection laws than the US, though I don't know them well enough to know which bits of this leak would be illegal here. Allowing the leak itself would be, at least under UK law.

So? The GP said "these days," not "in my country these days" stating it like it was some sort of universal truth. We aren't talking about compiling data on UK citizens or Dutch citizens, this is American companies compiling information about American citizens.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#117

Post by gr3yh47 »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #47

As long as the CEO of an company (RNC) that gives data to an outsourcer (Deep Root Analytics) is not going to jail to give data to an unqualified company, nothing will change. If the CEO goes to jail, things will change very rapidly (CEO will manage his CMO much tighter who will first want to see an security audit not older than 6 months). At least CEOs I have reported to as CTO were very sensitive for implemention i…

> (e.g. Sony, Sony, Sony, Sony, Sony, Sony, Sony, Sony)

ftfy

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#118

Post by yincrash »

DannyBee wrote: post #26
chillingeffect wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> already known information. No. Records released include "names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details, as well as data described as “modeled” voter ethnicities and religions." [0] Dates of Birth, Phone Numbers, Email Addresses are not public information. [1] [2] [0] OP [1] http://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127-29836-88651--F,00.h... [2] http://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elec…

You can get the other info trivially from other public sources.

Please link me to public sources where I can find political data analytics on myself.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#119

Post by kevinburke »

DannyBee wrote: post #24

Speaking as a guy with a lot of experience with voter data ( I built the first "where do I vote" apps for Google and helped found the voting information project): This is actually almost entirely public data. Yes, including addresses and phone numbers and political affiliation. There are some states that is not public as part of the voter file, but you can still get it other ways publicly. For example: USPS, etc. Som…

It's probably good that a lot of this is public, but one thing I think we're going to reckon with is how "available" all of this data should be, and how much it costs in terms of time or money to retrieve it.

Should I be able to find the public records for any citizen, anywhere in the country, at the snap of a finger? Or should I have to go to e.g. the courthouse and ask for the records in person, deal with a phone system, &c.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#120

Post by falcolas »

wyldfire wrote: post #12

I hate to be in the position of defending a leak such as this. But if what they've done is "merely" compiling data that was available from our public profiles, are they obligated to secure that compilation? I'm asking -- I don't know for sure how the data was gathered, it just sounds like it was from scraping public records + public web sites. Also, can someone ask Troy Hunt whether he has or can get access to this d…

Personally, while I understand that this is nothing illegal, I think it's terribly wrong.

We just handed everyone, including the 5% of society who tend towards sociopathy, a nicely tagged, collated (and yet probably slightly inaccurate) list of minorities.

Hate women? You have a nice list which includes the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all those women.

Hate muslims? Boy do I have just the list for you. Blacks? Republicans? White muslim men who live in the same neighborhood as you?

Let's omit the sociopaths for just a moment, and let's look at the ad networks. Can you picture how much more accurate a picture those companies have of you now? They no longer have to guess at your age, ethnicity or religion - they now know. What could go wrong when that list of "legally" collated data gets combined with the RNC leak, and is subsequently itself leaked?

So no. It's probably not illegal to compile these lists. It's probably not even illegal that it was released. But it was, for certain, a damned immoral thing to do, and there will be consequences.

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