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RNC Trove of Personal Data on U.S. Voters Left Exposed Online

HeadlineJun 22, 2017

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 UpGuard, 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. UpGuard 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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