<story><title>Marketing Firm Exactis Leaked a Personal Info Database with 340M Records</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/exactis-database-leak-340-million-records/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mysterypie</author><text>Oh, man, another missed opportunity to make the average Joe Six-Pack become aware of data aggregation and privacy violations. If the researcher had downloaded the 2TB of data and published it as a torrent, then laymen might care. When someone can query the list and see his own personal information being broadcast, they will understand. When they realize that anyone can look up the address, phone, and all sorts of other info about their wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, boss, children, or neighbor, they might get an inkling that privacy isn&amp;#x27;t such a stupid thing to worry about.&lt;p&gt;I realize that we &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; suffer if it gets made into a torrent, but sometimes pain is necessary to get action.&lt;p&gt;Within a week, this whole thing will be forgotten and nothing will have changed because privacy is too abstract for most people -- they need to &lt;i&gt;see&lt;/i&gt; the personal information that&amp;#x27;s being collected. The researcher acted properly, but going full Snowden would have had much greater impact on getting better privacy-preserving laws and technology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RyanZAG</author><text>&amp;quot;Missed opportunity&amp;quot; ?&lt;p&gt;People can be stabbed in the back if they go into dark alleys without watching behind them. Let&amp;#x27;s stab a few people who go into these alleys so that everyone will be afraid to do so and we have an opportunity to prevent people being stabbed in future by making them aware.&lt;p&gt;Why would you possibly think this is a good idea? The idea is to prevent pain, not cause more pain in some bizarre attempt at making people afraid. There&amp;#x27;s enough privacy violations - we don&amp;#x27;t need to be making more of them ourselves.</text></comment>
<story><title>Marketing Firm Exactis Leaked a Personal Info Database with 340M Records</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/exactis-database-leak-340-million-records/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mysterypie</author><text>Oh, man, another missed opportunity to make the average Joe Six-Pack become aware of data aggregation and privacy violations. If the researcher had downloaded the 2TB of data and published it as a torrent, then laymen might care. When someone can query the list and see his own personal information being broadcast, they will understand. When they realize that anyone can look up the address, phone, and all sorts of other info about their wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, boss, children, or neighbor, they might get an inkling that privacy isn&amp;#x27;t such a stupid thing to worry about.&lt;p&gt;I realize that we &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; suffer if it gets made into a torrent, but sometimes pain is necessary to get action.&lt;p&gt;Within a week, this whole thing will be forgotten and nothing will have changed because privacy is too abstract for most people -- they need to &lt;i&gt;see&lt;/i&gt; the personal information that&amp;#x27;s being collected. The researcher acted properly, but going full Snowden would have had much greater impact on getting better privacy-preserving laws and technology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawaymath</author><text>You can already make the sort of nuanced queries you&amp;#x27;re talking about for any of the hundreds of millions of Americans whose records have been leaked in one of the state voter or B2C lead-gen databases. The dumps are all freely available on databases.today and various forums. Phone numbers, addresses, names, email addresses, relationships, members of household...it&amp;#x27;s all in there, even if paid searches like Intelius don&amp;#x27;t have it.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, anyone who tries to normalize the data and release a public frontend for querying it will probably be dropped by their hosting provider and ostracized by the security community. People don&amp;#x27;t tend to like the idea of what you&amp;#x27;re talking about and will blame the person hosting the information as much as the people who leak it; much like how Troy Hunt will never release the HIBP corpus of normalized password dumps, he&amp;#x27;ll only allow you to seen if you&amp;#x27;re in it.&lt;p&gt;The impact of searching your personal data with that kind of granularity would probably be more dramatic than seeing your compromised passwords online, but I bet it would be even more villified.</text></comment>