Personal details of nearly 200 million US citizens exposed - almost 62% of the USA

[Dos_Box]

Well, this is, erm, BIG! - Personal details of nearly 200 million US citizens exposed - BBC News

 

Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee.

The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population.

The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server.

Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.

 

We shall have to have a word with our US colleagues in the next few days to see just how strict their DPA regs are compared to those in Europe.

[Garacesh]

Personal details of nearly 200 million US citizens exposed - BBC News

 

Jeeee-zus!

Almost sixty-two percent of the population of America!?

 

The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population.

The information seems to have been collected from a wide range of sources - from posts on controversial banned threads on the social network Reddit, to committees that raised funds for the Republican Party.

The information was stored in spreadsheets uploaded to a server owned by Deep Root Analytics. It had last been updated in January when President Donald Trump was inaugurated and had been online for an unknown period of time.

Apart from personal details, the data also contained citizens' suspected religious affiliations, ethnicities and political biases, such as where they stood on controversial topics like gun control, the right to abortion and stem cell research.

[Vasriel]

The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server. Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.

 

Really? come on now, your hosting that kind of data online and there is no security on it?

[localzuk]

That's a preposterously large data leak! Lucky that the USA has such stringent controls over their data...

[ADMaster]

And I had to read about a US data breach on a UK website... I don't think we have anything close to DPA or GDPR.

We have HIPAA, CIPA, and COPPA but I don't think we have anything that would have covered this. INAL

I'm glad I have lifelock, and 2fa on my accounts, that should minimize the damage.