A marketing firm that was contracted by the Republican National Committee left the personal data of over 200 million voters wide open. This includes birth dates, emails, physical addresses, religion, race, and more.
Gizmodo reports:
“The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.”
Cybersecurity problems aren’t isolated to just the Republican Party; however, this is the second time that Republican party voter data was leaked. In 2015, presidential hopeful Jeb Bush accidentally released hundreds of voters’ emails. Many of them contained personal data including Social Security numbers.
The consulting company, Deep Root Analytics, said this in a statement:
“Deep Root Analytics builds voter models to help enhance advertiser understanding of TV viewership. The data accessed was not built for or used by any specific client. It is our proprietary analysis to help inform local television ad buying.”
“The data that was accessed was, to the best of our knowledge proprietary information as well as voter data that is publicly available and readily provided by state government offices. Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access. We take full responsibility for this situation.”
Sorry, Trumpers! They can’t even keep your data straight. This just further shows how incompetent the Republican party can be.
Here is a news video about this (after the jump):
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot.
