U.S. Service Members’ Personal Data Readily Available on the Cheap, Report Says
Data brokers are marketing vast tranches of sensitive personal data on U.S. service members at rates as low as $0.12 per record, according to a recent report sponsored by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. This finding alone is unsurprising, but the report (authored by researchers at Duke University) discovered that brokers advertise data as specifically pertaining to current and former members of the military. What is surprising is that Congress is still considering measures that will make it more difficult to protect private information.
The Duke researchers found broker listings both for aggregated and individualized data, including “non-public, individually identified, and sensitive data, such as health data, financial data, and information about religious practices.”
Regarding one dataset, the authors write, “For those 4,951 military personnel, the dataset included their name, home address, email address, political affiliation, gender, age, income, net worth, credit rating, occupation, presence of children in the home (yes/no), marital status, homeowner/renter status, home value, and religion.”
Of course, brokers market the personal data of all citizens who use technology – not just service members. Phones, apps, websites, and other technologies collect extensive and quite personal information on their users. Overwhelmingly, these data – even if putatively anonymous – contain clues that lead back to the individual user.
“In 2018, people created, captured, copied, and consumed 33 zettabytes (ZB) of data – approximately 33 trillion gigabytes or 128,906,250,000 maxed-out iPhone 12s’ worth of information,” writes the American Enterprise Institute’s Klon Kitchen. “This number jumped to 59 ZB in 2020 and is predicted to hit 175 ZB by 2025. Put another way: Humans currently produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. If you laid flat 2.5 quintillion pennies, you could cover the earth’s surface five times.”
These figures have only grown in the intervening years.
Recognizing the risks private market data present to personal privacy, tech companies have introduced countermeasures. While far from perfect, these tools have measurably improved user privacy.
Policy makers should recognize the grave privacy risks digital technologies pose, and they should refrain from advancing regulation that weakens private industry’s ability to neutralize the bad actors.
Published on November 30, 2023