Report: Unregulated Data Brokers Sell Military Family Info For Pennies

Privacy

from the dysfunction-junction dept

We’ve noted many times that there are two major reasons that the U.S. still hasn’t passed even a basic privacy law for the internet era or regulated data brokers. One, the U.S. government is corrupt, and has repeatedly buckled to the lobbying of multiple industries that find the current dysfunction very profitable. Two, the government loves the current lax system because it allows them to dodge warrants.

The result has been a decidedly ugly parade of scandals in which user location or other data is abused in new and obnoxious ways by a long line of dodgy companies. Scandals we routinely do nothing about.

Case in point: a new study out of Duke University dug into the habits of data brokers and found that they can routinely be found selling the personal data of U.S. military personnel, often for pennies:

“It is not difficult to obtain sensitive data about active-duty members of the military, their families, and veterans, including non-public, individually identified, and sensitive data, such as health data, financial data, and information about religious practices. The team bought this and other data from U.S. data brokers via a .org and a .asia domain for as low as $0.12 per record. Location data is also available, though the team did not purchase it.”

The researchers said it was “shockingly easy” to obtain the data, which included information on deployed soldiers’ children. Often the data brokers involved did little or nothing to validate the identity of folks making the purchases (even if the buyer identified themselves as a foreign operation). As usual, claims by companies that this data was “anonymized” and therefore protected mean absolutely nothing since the word is effectively gibberish.

Data included pretty much anything you can imagine, from address and income data to geolocation movement patterns, and all the analysis used to monetize it. The researchers concluded the data represents a very clear risk to deployed forces and overall national security:

“It’s a congressional issue at the end of the day,” Barton said. “This is a systemic problem, and the solution is for Congress to pass legislation around this issue and actually fund regulators like the FTC to actually do enforcement.”

Of course our corrupt Congress will do… nothing. They’ve been lobbied into apathy by a wide coalition of companies that make billions annually off of an ad-engagement ecosystem that simply couldn’t care less about consumer privacy, or the risks therein.

Eventually, this unaccountable monster we’ve built will result in a scandal so ugly and fatal that even our corrupt Congress will be forced to act. Maybe. Until then, lawmakers will just keep trying to distract you from our corrupt failure to regulate data brokers by endlessly hyperventilating about TikTok while pretending to care about consumer privacy on cable news.

Filed Under: corruption, data brokers, location data, national security, privacy, regulation