In the largest breach of electoral data, personal details and sensitive information of over 200 million people in the US was accidentally leaked by a marketing firm, contracted by the Republican National Committee. ,
According to Gizmodo, a technology news website, personal information of nearly 61% of the US population was leaked by Deep Root Analytics.
As per reports, data of around 1.1 terabytes seems to have been collected from a wide range of sources, ranging from posts on controversial banned threads on social media to committees that raised funds for the Republican Party.
The citizens’ suspected religious affiliations, ethnicities and political biases, were also collected in the data. It was related to controversial subjects such as gun control, the right to abortion and stem cell research, the report claimed.
The information was stored in spreadsheets uploaded to a server owned by the firm. It was updated in January when President Donald Trump was inaugurated and had been online for an unknown period of time.
“We 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,” Deep Root Analytics’ founder Alex Lundry, said.
“Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access,” Lundry said.
The privacy experts are concerned about the scale of the data gathered in the US, as the obtained data can be used for any kind of nefarious purposes.
