The data leak contains a wealth of personal data on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home locations, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include high-level sentiment analyses used by political groups to foretell where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as presumed religious association and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the prohibited subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.
Deep Root Analytics, a stable data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, confirmed ownership of the data to Gizmodo on Friday.
UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery learned Deep Root’s data online last week. More than a terabyte was stored on the cloud server without the security of a password and could be accessed by anyone who found the URL. Many of the files did not start at Deep Root, but are instead the aggregate of outside data firms and Republican super PACs, casting light onto the increasingly advanced data ecosystem that helped drive President Donald Trump’s slim margins in key swing states.
Although files controlled by Deep Root would be typical in any campaign, Republican or Democratic, experts say its susceptibility in a single open database raises significant privacy concerns. “This is valuable for people who have evil purposes,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Justice and Technology, said of the data.
The Koch brothers’ political group Americans for Success, which had a data-swapping agreement with Data Trust during the 2016 election period, contributed heavily to the exposed files, as did the market study firm TargetPoint, whose co-founder previously served as the CEO of Mitt Romney’s strategy team. (The Koch brothers also subsidized a data organization known as i360, which began exchanging voter data with Data Trust in 2014.) Furthermore, the files provided by Rove’s American Crossroads contain strategic voter data used to target, among others, estranged Democrats and undecideds in Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and other key battleground states.
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