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June 22, 2017

RNC Trove of Personal Data on U.S. Voters Left Exposed Online
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In privacy news, the Republican National Committee compiled a vast trove
of data detailing personal information on virtually every U.S. voter,
and then left the information unsecured on the open internet for nearly
two weeks earlier this month. That's according to the internet security
firm Up Guard, which reports the RNC gathered more than a petabyte of
data-or more than 1 quadrillion bytes of information-on 198 million
voters' addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and social media posts. The
data was compiled by the Republican firm Deep Root Analytics on behalf
of the RNC and included so-called advanced sentiment analyses of voters'
views on hot-button issues like gun rights, healthcare and abortion. Up
Guard discovered the data was available for download from June 1 to 14,
meaning it could now be in the possession of hackers, foreign
governments or identity thieves.


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