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Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

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Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#231

Post by unityByFreedom »

jack_kc wrote: post #194
nostrademons wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birthday is almost certainly public. You can get it easily from the DMV or from any of several dozen commercial providers that resell government data: https://www.dmv.org/public-records/ That it's used to confirm identity shows how weak identity-theft protections are at most institutions, not what's public information. (For that matter, mother's maiden name is basically public information as well: you can get it from…

The site you linked to is not affiliated with any state DMV. It links to a sketchy background check service that appears to be a scam. Edit: spelling

That, and, I've never consented to release my birthday publicly. I consider it to be private, therefore it is private. It's mine! I expect the government would not release it since they use it as part of an identifier all the time.

There's no perfect identifier. That's why we need security. This is a major lapse.

Pretty sneaky of the comment above yours to try to pass dmv.org as a government website.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#232

Post by thatcat »

jellicle wrote: post #66
thatcat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the publically available source to view voting history ? I thought that was protected information.

How one votes is secret. Whether one votes is typically compiled by the government and made available to political parties and often the general public.

enzanki_ars and BoiledCabbage cite the publicly accessible preference/views data categories which included the party you vote for

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#233

Post by Taniwha »

I think people are missing the big legal liability .... this information has been published to the world, it contains estimates of people's deeply held political beliefs - some of it will be wildly wrong and those people might consider that they have been libeled .... roll on the lawsuits

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#234

Post by MR4D »

I'm just waiting to hear Trump tell Deep Root Analytics, "You're Fired!"

It would be good to see him make this a clear case of responsibility. Also, someone on the RNC side needs to get fired, too. I'm not sure who, but errors this big demand it.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#235

Post by ksk »

anigbrowl wrote: post #220
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm really impressed at the lengths people will go to defend those whose malfeasance or ineptitude unarguably worsen the lives of up to two hundred million people. You seem like a smart person, please tell me how you think it's OK that these folks' contact details and potentially very detailed psychological and political profile information are now likely available on the dark web? So far I've seen people disagree…

We've been having reasonable discussions on these topics for many years. Discussions that never lead to decisions and actions are a sideshow. I'm calling for action - strong user-centric privacy protections with strict liability and significant personal and organization penalties for negligence, similar to the French model.

Criminalizing something doesn't mean you've "done something about it". It just means you've applied a traditionally flawed approach to fix a systemic problem that could be better handled through education, training and awareness. However, those things are much harder to do than to simply write something into the legal code without the public being any more prepared to deal with the situation.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#236

Post by sixothree »

stale2002 wrote: post #202
criley2 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>?A careless programmer makes a bad choice and the CEO has to go to jail? Come on An institutional failure of review, testing and security that will lead to tens of billions of dollars of identity theft goes unpunished completely? Come on. A CEO is responsible for his organization. If you ruin lives, you have to pay the price. Can't handle the heat? Don't take the job. I hate how CEO's get hundred million dollar para…

This isn't social security numbers. This is all publicly available data scrapping stuff. Like your public Facebook profile. If you don't want that stuff to be leaked, then don't put your info publicly on Facebook.

It's still not clear that this is all publicly available information.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#237

Post by BinaryIdiot »

bluejekyll wrote: post #183
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't blame a "careless programmer" when the real problem is organizations simply not committing any resources to security. It's like a hospital only employing 1 nurse and blaming her when patients inevitably die. This isn't a very good example. A shortage of nurses will directly correlate to poor patient care and possible death. But a shortage of security experts? Who knows. I worked at an insurance company th…

> Security is a major problem in tech. It's very difficult, it's nuanced and its vast. Security covers so so much that it would be difficult to one or maybe even a handful of security experts to fully over all aspects of an app depending on your scope. Which is why it's so important to hold companies that screw it up accountable. That's the only way to get it to change. Forget about everything else, accountability wi…

> Which is why it's so important to hold companies that screw it up accountable. That's the only way to get it to change. Forget about everything else, accountability will force new rules for data storage and protection. Without accountability, nothing will change.

Sure but everyone on HN suggests accountability but never defines what they mean by it except for the few who think someone should just be thrown in jail.

So, what do you suggest for accountability?

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#238

Post by unityByFreedom »

dragonwriter wrote: post #197
unityByFreedom wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is actually almost entirely public data Birthday is an included item. That's definitely private as it is often used to confirm identity. "almost public" is meaningless. One data item, like credit card number, or birthday, can make this a dangerous leak.

> Birthday is an included item. That's definitely private as it is often used to confirm identity. Lots of things that are actually not private data are used to confirm identity; “it is used to confirm identity” is not a disproof that a piece of information is public information.

Would you like to share your full name and birthday with the world?

I wouldn't. Therefore it is private.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#239

Post by bryondowd »

arianvanp wrote: post #181
wyldfire wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa! We got to Godwin super fast this time. Please re-read what I wrote and consider that I might have the best intentions to explore a discussion with HN. Note also that I discussed the nature of securing the data and not its compilation. Note that IMO several European countries forfeit some freedoms that I consider valuable and critical for democracy. IMO it is your right to observe the world as it is and note wha…

It's not an attack at you personally. The contrary. But I noticed that a lot of comments found this kind of data collection 'normal'. and apparently in the US this is very much legal. And I as a person find this very troubling, because in Europe these kind of decisions caused a Genocide, which is a result that should not be taken lightly. Do you really want the RNC to collect religious information about all 200 milli…

I'm no expert on the subject, so feel free to set me straight. It seem to me, though, that this is a bit like cargo culting. An association between some part of a process and the result that doesn't factor in the big picture. More specifically, wouldn't the presence of such lists have proven a minor and nonessential part of the genocide? If the Nazis didn't have those lists, would they have just thrown up their hands and went away? It seems they'd have just gathered the information by the usual 'everyone accusing his neighbor' witch-hunt means, with people using it to settle grudges or other nefarious reasons. Maybe it would be less accurate, and maybe a little slower, but ultimately, you'd probably have about the same amount of bloodshed, I would expect. The real keys to these situations are a powerful group with ill intent and a population that is at least willing to condone it. If those are in place, the list doesn't really matter, and if they aren't in place, the list doesn't really matter. So why does the list matter?

Note, this is an invitation to enlighten me, not a firm belief on my part.

Re: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

#240

Post by edanm »

criley2 wrote: post #176
strictnein wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What law did they break, exactly? These aren't medical or financial records. A careless programmer makes a bad choice and the CEO has to go to jail? Come on.

>?A careless programmer makes a bad choice and the CEO has to go to jail? Come on An institutional failure of review, testing and security that will lead to tens of billions of dollars of identity theft goes unpunished completely? Come on. A CEO is responsible for his organization. If you ruin lives, you have to pay the price. Can't handle the heat? Don't take the job. I hate how CEO's get hundred million dollar para…

"A CEO is responsible for his organization. If you ruin lives, you have to pay the price."

If you break the law, you pay the price of jailtime. If you haven't broken the law, you might pay the price in the marketplace, but that's all.

If a law was broken, then of course whoever broke it should be prosecuted. But I don't think anyone disagrees with that, nor does it need to be explained in a lengthy HN comment. The only reason we need such an explanation is exactly because this isn't the way our society works. We set up the rules of the game and expect people to play within those rules, but we don't go around jailing people because we dislike them or disagree with their choices.

"CEO's bear responsibility for their organizations, or the organization should not exist."

Don't forget that a CEO is an employee, and just one employee. A particularly important and influential (and well-paid) one, but "just" an employee. An organization is not solely defined by its CEO, nor does it make sense to think of them as all-powerful in terms of what the organization does. A CEO who doesn't perform can (and probably will!) be fired at some point.

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