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Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

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Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#31

Post by cheeseprocedure »

lukan wrote: post #29
mig39 wrote: post #22

My understanding is that when Elections Alberta shares the voter list with legit users (ie: sitting members of the legislature), it includes unique fictitious entries in the data. That way if there is a leak of the data, they can trace the source of the leak. Which they apparently have done. I guess it's a form of a canary trap. It reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case…

" reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them." Sounds the same to me, but are you sure they are doing it like this, or you guess?

This practice was confirmed by Elections Alberta:

> Each electoral list legitimately released by Elections Alberta includes a certain number of fictitious — or "seeded" — names. These unique entries on each electoral list allow investigators to trace each dataset back to their source in the event of a breach.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-vo...

Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#33

Post by [deleted] »

lukan wrote: post #29
mig39 wrote: post #22

My understanding is that when Elections Alberta shares the voter list with legit users (ie: sitting members of the legislature), it includes unique fictitious entries in the data. That way if there is a leak of the data, they can trace the source of the leak. Which they apparently have done. I guess it's a form of a canary trap. It reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case…

" reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them." Sounds the same to me, but are you sure they are doing it like this, or you guess?

[deleted]

Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#34

Post by hexagonsuns »

pjc50 wrote: post #27
hexagonsuns wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing is really suspicious. If you dig deeper on the Centurion Project, things start to get weird. The Centurion Project website has little to no information, archives of the site go back to just over a month ago, and the address and phone number are for a random UPS Store in Calgary. I got really suspicious when I started looking into Parker himself. He spews the typical "right wing" rhetoric -- Globalists…

Quite possibly all those other people believe something like that. The "elites" are vulnerable to Internet brain worms like everyone else.

That's a bit of a stretch, it's more plausible that Mr. Parker is a plant

Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#36

Post by 1attice »

uticus wrote: post #3

In terms of "safety" this leak is a drop in the bucket. The greater concern would be that election systems are involved. If election information is unintentionally readable, it is also therefore potentially alterable.

It doesn't work that way -- it's not an open DB endpoint with misconfigured permissions, or something like that.

Up here there is a custom of sharing essentially a dump of the elector's table with every political party in the early days of an election.

This dump is seeded with some fake data before being released to a single political party, so if said party gets up to shenanigans, we know about it. These of course do nothing to prevent privacy violations, only to detect and punish them after the fact.

Personally I think this is a dated system from a bygone era, as there is obvious risk of permanent harm via election fraud in an environment where politics actors are highly motivated. If you believe Canada is an evil woke empire from which you must protect your sons, you will likely not care about Canadian electoral law.

Electorate data should be maintained by the political parties themselves, and guarded like nukes. New political parties should put in the hoofwork to build their own damn lists.

Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#37

Post by LurkandComment »

LurkandComment wrote: post #20

If you'rea domestic violence survivor and your info was just leaked. There are a lot of Private Investigators who look for this information for exes etc.

"An Edmonton city councillor says he and his team are helping a woman facing intimate partner violence relocate with her children after her address was leaked in an alleged privacy breach by a separatist group."

Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#38

Post by dblohm7 »

Teever wrote: post #13
tptacek wrote: post #9

The phone numbers in these data sets are weird and problematic, but the equivalent data in the US is usually public, and available for free to any registered candidate.

It appears that they registered as a party to get access to the data and them disseminated it publicly through a vibecoded app. While this data may generally be public in the US, it usually isn't in Canada, and there's an expectation that parties don't publish the data and it is seeded to detect that. A bigger problem is that people in Canada sign up for this list with the expectation that this data will remain reaso…

I mean, it's not really optional for Canadians _not_ to sign up for the list. It's the official list of electors. If you're a citizen, you're going to end up on the voter list one way or another.

Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#39

Post by tfourb »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #14

Disaster? I remember when they would print up big books with everyone's address and telephone number. Then they would distribute these to everyone. While this wasn't exactly the same as the voting list, it was usually pretty close.

At least in Germany, you'd have to opt in to your name and address being included in the phone book. So no, it's not remotely close to getting your personal details leaked publicly.

Re: Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

#40

Post by masfuerte »

mystraline wrote: post #5

So here in the Midwest USA, I can go to election commission and legally obtain the voter registration file. It, by law, is public. Anybody who asks for it must be provided the file. Naturally the law is pre-internet and ignorant of abuses you can do. But I'm not sure how this leak compares. Is it party affiliations and loads of PII to the point of impersonation?

In the UK it's semi-public. The full register is available to politicians and credit reference agencies. You can inspect the register by attending in person at your local council office. You don't get a copy.

There's also the edited register, which anybody can buy a copy of. You only appear in this list if you opt-in when you register. I don't know why anybody does.

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