In other news, already known information. Every USA states has clear laws on releasing whose registered with which party, past affiliation and address.
Clickbait.
Clickbait.
> 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.
In some Western countries, the mere existence of such a database would be illegal. Especially relating to religion and ethnicity. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/can-the-french-talk-...
In the US, it is leaked online.
It's not a "leak" when the data is entirely public already...
However, it isn't a "leak" in the traditional colloquial sense that someone stole the data and released it to the public. It's just a security leak.
So, if I look at your post history and make a guess about what religion and ethnicity you might have, and write that down, am I in possession of an illegal database if I lived in e.g. France?
I did take a quick look, and it seems that I have a good idea about your full name, face, hair color, political views and party affiliation, your employer, etc. All this data (together with demographics of others) would also allow to make some guess about your religious preferences. All of that might be wrong, but it might also be right, so let's assume for the sake of argument that I write my guesses down and happen to have an entry that contains your full name, ethnicity and religion, just like the leaked data has.
Should this be considered a crime?
Does this change depending on how many people I look at?
Does this change depending on how accurate my guesses are?
It is mostly publicly available data, but not always easily accessible (states have varying requirements and methods of acquisition), firms go through quite a bit to get aggregate files in all 50 states. For them to be put up with no protection is jarring. But not surprising with other recent disclosures.
I only wish we had access to the files to do some queries across them!
down now LOL! (Зеркало скоро доступно)
No. Records released include "names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details, as well as data described as “modeled” voter ethnicities and religions." [0]
Dates of Birth, Phone Numbers, Email Addresses are not public information. [1] [2]
[0] OP
[1] http://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127-29836-88651--F,00.h...
[2] http://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/FAQs/GeneralRegist...
I already mentioned the modeling parts are not public.
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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.
> Clickbait.
Even if no laws were broken, it may be news to those who are unaware that carveouts to PII disclosure laws have been made and their PII (along with polling data indicating preferences on lots of topics[1]) has been leaked.
Also, "politicians are at the very best so indifferent to citizen-unit privacy concerns that they can't be arsed to hire competent admins" may not exactly be news, but additional data points illustrative of that fact are.
[1] What can be done with that? Well, at the very least, a PI/con-artist/other party with a motivation to approach you cold would certainly love this sort of profile for anyone they're interested in. Think about it for a minute.