![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ghanamma.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/4413321139497_946966675317.jpg\" "\\"USA")
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Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee.<\/p>\n
The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population.<\/p>\n
The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server.<\/p>\n
Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.<\/p>\n
Political biases exposed<\/h2>\n
The huge cache of data was discovered last week by Chris Vickery, a cyber-risk analyst with security firm UpGuard. The information seems to have been collected from a wide range of sources \u2013 from posts on controversial banned threads on the social network Reddit, to committees that raised funds for the Republican Party.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe take full responsibility for this situation. Based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked,\u201d Deep Root Analytics\u2019 founder Alex Lundry told technology website\u00a0Gizmodo.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apart from personal details, the data also contained citizens\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
The file names and directories indicated that the data was meant to be used by influential Republican political organisations. The idea was to try to create a profile on as many voters as possible using all available data, so some of the fields in the spreadsheets were left left empty if an answer could not be found.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat such an enormous national database could be created and hosted online, missing even the simplest of protections against the data being publicly accessible, is troubling,\u201d Dan O\u2019Sullivan wrote in a\u00a0blog post\u00a0on Upguard\u2019s website.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ability to collect such information and store it insecurely further calls into question the responsibilities owed by private corporations and political campaigns to those citizens targeted by increasingly high-powered data analytics operations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Privacy concerns<\/h2>\n
Although it is known that political parties routinely gather data on voters, this is the largest breach of electoral data in the US to date and privacy experts are concerned about the sheer scale of the data gathered.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is deeply troubling. This is not just sensitive, it\u2019s intimate information, predictions about people\u2019s behaviour, opinions and beliefs that people have never decided to disclose to anyone,\u201d Privacy International\u2019s policy officer Frederike Kaltheuner told the BBC News website.<\/p>\n
However, the issue of data collection and\u00a0using computer models to predict voter behaviour\u00a0is not just limited to marketing firms \u2013 Privacy International says that the entire online advertising ecosystem\u00a0operates in the same way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a threat to the way democracy works. The GOP [Republican Party] relied on publicly-collected, commercially-provided information. Nobody would have realised that the data they entrusted to one organisation would end up in a database used to target them politically.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou should be in charge of what is happening to your data, who can use it and for what purposes,\u201d Ms Kaltheuner added.<\/p>\n
There are fears that leaked data can easily be used for nefarious purposes, from identity fraud to harassment of people under protection orders, or to intimidate people who hold an opposing political view.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe potential for this type of data being made available publicly and on the dark web is extremely high,\u201d Paul Fletcher, a cyber-security evangelist at security firm Alert Logic told the BBC.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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