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Privacy The Internet Politics

Voted In America? VoteRef Probably Doxed You (404media.co) 208

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you voted in the U.S. presidential election yesterday in which Donald Trump won comfortably, or a previous election, a website powered by a right-wing group is probably doxing you. VoteRef makes it trivial for anyone to search the name, physical address, age, party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year for people living in most states instantly and for free. This can include ordinary citizens, celebrities, domestic abuse survivors, and many other people. Voting rolls are public records, and ways to more readily access them are not new. But during a time of intense division, political violence, or even the broader threat of data being used to dox or harass anyone, sites like VoteRef turn a vital part of the democratic process -- simply voting -- into a security and privacy threat. [...]

The Voter Reference Foundation, which runs VoteRef, is a right wing organization helmed by a former Trump campaign official, ProPublica previously reported. The goal for that organization was to find irregularities in the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, but state election officials said their findings were "fundamentally incorrect," ProPublica added. In an interview with NPR, the ProPublica reporter said that the Voter Reference Foundation insinuated (falsely) that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was fraudulent in some way. 404 Media has found people on social media using VoteRef's data to spread voting conspiracies too. VoteRef has steadily been adding more states' records to the VoteRef website. At the time of writing, it has records for all states that legally allow publication. Some exceptions include California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. ProPublica reported that VoteRef removed the Pennsylvania data after being contacted by an attorney for Pennsylvania's Department of State.
"Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers.

"Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records -- which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws -- has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said. "Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between depends on reframing how we think about public records privacy and the mass aggregation and sale of our data."

Voted In America? VoteRef Probably Doxed You

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  • Ah, there lies the rub. Privacy protection from aggregating in the past was provided by the volume of data and the cost. Now it is less expensive. I favor a constitutional amendment to protect against it. Especially with respect to advertising, politics, and medical.
    • Voter registration is a State issue regulated by law. Why would a constitutional amendment be useful?
      • by msk ( 6205 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @08:22PM (#64929359)

        Voter registration is a State issue regulated by law. Why would a constitutional amendment be useful?

        An amendment could change that.

        Unfortunately, Congress has little will to act to protect the people most vulnerable, so enabling legislation is likely to be weak, or slanted to favor the oligarchs.

        • Voter registration is a State issue not a federal issue. There are laws in each State concerning voter registration and this is how some States went full-in for 'motor voter' registrations. Advocating for a federal constitutional amendment is living in fiction. If you want a change, the place to do it is the office of your State legislature.
        • don't forget, this is about money, so Congress will (maybe) make big noises, but then leave loopholes.
      • well, I for one see this as something that the federal government should be doing, just like securing our borders is a federal responsibility, rather than a state one...

        To be clear, the people complaining the loudest about 'securing our borders' are really only complaining about the Southern Border, which is only a problem for four states, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

        I hear no one complaining about securing our Northern Border. Other than the Border Patrol/DHS/other Federal Agencies.

        Yes

    • by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @08:06PM (#64929329)

      hm.. My thinking is "aggregating" data offline in reasonable amounts should be fine.

      However your voter registration details ought not be public. Public records should be information about government operations NOT citizens' personal details.

      In addition public records should NOT mean that private corporations are allowed to conduct mass aggregation. I will give an example: land ownership records. They are and should be public records, but retrieving and saving copies of the records en mass for properties that you are not connected with and have no specific business with ought to be illegal.

      Finally; the largest issue is placing it online on servers connected to the internet in a manner that makes personally-identifiable info on people searchable by others Or opens the possibility to exposure in a data breach.

      I would honestly say this concept of a "data broker" who collects and resells information to members of the public indiscriminately or for trivial purposes such as marketing should be Illegal.

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        hm.. My thinking is "aggregating" data offline in reasonable amounts should be fine.

        However your voter registration details ought not be public. Public records should be information about government operations NOT citizens' personal details.

        I'd like to see the same thinking applied to all records about an individual, including personal addresses used for registering a business or nonprofit, DBAs, etc. The government should have them, but they should not be considered public records that can be obtained except in conjunction with a court order, because the alternative is just inviting harassment.

        Speaking of which,

        • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Speaking of which,

          Sorry, didn't finish that. Speaking of which, I wonder if any of these organizations have any "public records" that might be interesting to the public.

        • The states maintain business records so that, among other things, lawsuits can be properly served. As soon as McDonalds is willing to accept default judgments in cases where a franchisee's assistant manager was served, I'll support removing business information from public view.

          If this were actually a big deal, there's a simple solution: form your entity in Delaware. Ain't nobody idly paying the fees those guys demand for basic information.
          • by mysidia ( 191772 )

            The states maintain business records so that, among other things, lawsuits can be properly served.

            This is a good reason to require registration but Not a good reason for the records to be publicly available with no privacy protections for private organizations.

            I would say the solution is they should have the registry but control access strictly. An entity wishing to get registration details of a private business should have to submit a formal application listing the businesses whose records they are l

            • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

              Business records should not be private, as a (potential) customer of any business you want to know who you're dealing with.
              Privacy rules should only extend to personal records.

              If the data is available there will always be those who seek to aggregate it, and even if you make it troublesome to obtain one record someone will work out how to automate that and retrieve them all.

      • by necro81 ( 917438 )

        Public records should be information about government operations NOT citizens' personal details.

        You've heard of the white pages, right?

      • The Federal Government has passed right to privacy laws in health (HIPAA), in education (FERPA); and since I view privacy as a human right, we need to see action on privacy in voter registrations, on web browsing, on land ownership, and many other areas of life.

        I am not optimistic any of these things will happen in the coming Trump administration - there's too much money to be made on private data and too much power in being able to intimidate people who are registered to vote in a way that you don't want
    • The article is also misleading, since every other voter related organization and every company that cared to access this information already had it. Which means all the scammers had it as well from those sources either from hacks or from them outright selling it bundled up nice and neat. The only difference here is that the general public now has access to the same information.

  • by Kwelstr ( 114389 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @07:26PM (#64929275)
    I tried to read their terms of service but to do so I get a prompt to agree to the terms of service. I can't read them if I don't agree first \_()_/
    • Re:Terms of service (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @08:25PM (#64929367) Homepage Journal

      I tried to read their terms of service but to do so I get a prompt to agree to the terms of service. I can't read them if I don't agree first \_()_/

      Pretty sure that renders any agreement inherently null and void. Personally, I'd create a screen recording of that fact, followed by me clicking it, and then try to find as many creative ways to violate it as I could, just for the entertainment value of seeing their lawyers' faces when I sent them that video in response to any complaints, but that's just me. :-D

      • Pretty sure that renders any agreement inherently null and void. Personally, I'd create a screen recording of that fact, followed by me clicking it, and then try to find as many creative ways to violate it as I could, just for the entertainment value of seeing their lawyers' faces when I sent them that video in response to any complaints, but that's just me. :-D

        Just wondering... Are you employed, like with a job?
        • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Pretty sure that renders any agreement inherently null and void. Personally, I'd create a screen recording of that fact, followed by me clicking it, and then try to find as many creative ways to violate it as I could, just for the entertainment value of seeing their lawyers' faces when I sent them that video in response to any complaints, but that's just me. :-D

          Just wondering... Are you employed, like with a job?

          Yeah, and no, it's not as a lawyer. But I do recall from the law-related classes I have taken over the years that a contract requires a meeting of the minds, and it is therefore fundamentally impossible to form a contract if one side of the contract is prohibited from reading it by the other side, because no such meeting of the minds can possibly occur without some reasonable awareness of what you're agreeing to.

          Ergo, if you could show that it appears to be impossible to actually read the terms of service

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Funniest of the jokes on the mixed target. Obviously lots of room for humor, but not really such a funny story...

  • Confused (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07, 2024 @07:27PM (#64929277)

    Does anyone know why VoteRef doxxed me 107 times? Do they perform a separate doxing operation for each vote I cast this year?

  • by russotto ( 537200 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @07:55PM (#64929311) Journal

    This site doesn't have me, but if it did, so what? If you've made any political contributions, you can look that up at various sites, but since they're either left-wing or apparently bipartisan (OpenSecrets), nobody bats an eye.

    If they somehow linked my pseudonymous slashdot handle with my name, THAT would be doxing. (Except my slashdot handle isn't pseudonymous anyway)

    • by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @09:27PM (#64929465) Homepage Journal

      This site doesn't have me, but if it did, so what? If you've made any political contributions, you can look that up at various sites, but since they're either left-wing or apparently bipartisan (OpenSecrets), nobody bats an eye.

      If they somehow linked my pseudonymous slashdot handle with my name, THAT would be doxing. (Except my slashdot handle isn't pseudonymous anyway)

      Suppose I didn't vote, but VoteRef shows that I did. That indicates voting fraud, someone entered an absentee vote in my name.

      Suppose the lot across from me is vacant, and VoteRef shows that several people registered and voted using that address.

      VoteRef is useful for identifying and combatting voter fraud. Lots and lots of theories on how vote fraud could occur, having the data open and available for everyone can lower the temperature, and reassure people that the voting process is secure.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dirk ( 87083 )

        In some nice world that we don't live in, that could be true. In the world we actually live in, that is not at all what is happening. They are not some nice website that is out there to help reassure people the voting process is secure. They have made insinuations that the 2020 election was stolen (it wasn't). They have taken normal discrepancies and used them to imply fraud is occurring (it isn't on any meaningful level). They have raised the temperature not lowered it, and that is their goal.

        • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          And how do you know these claims are false? Because you and others have access to the data and can prove or disprove the claims being made.

          If there are signs of fraud or discrepancies they should not be ignored, in case they are symptoms of a serious problem. If they're investigated and turn out to be trivial matters then that's fine, what matters is that the investigation takes place openly and transparently so that people can have faith in the process and results.

          People are always going to make false clai

  • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @08:28PM (#64929373)

    Because left wing groups and companies fully respect your privacy.

    • "Both hyenas and gazelles have eyes. Therefore, pay no attention to the glowing orbs full of hate and hunger staring at you from the tall grass." -You, if you were capable of poetry.
      • I had a 6 month long real time conversation with a gf back in the day entirely in Haiku.

        I'm sure you're a better poet, however. Because reasons. Good ones. Such as, you don't like me. You win!

        • Your story was plausible until it involved you having a gf.

          I'm not a poet. I just thought what I happened to write sounded pretty cool.
          • Glad I read to the end of the thread before responding to that jackass. Of course, it might actually be funny if a bunch of us responded basically the same way you did. I have no doubt he'd be a one-man population explosion if his hand could get pregnant.

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @08:32PM (#64929385)
    Because if you did, they have you now.
  • Has anyone looked into this source?
  • The first step for almost any political campaign is to get a list of registered voters. How do you think they get your address for all those mailings? These are public records available to anyone. I know some states place restrictions on how the lists are used, usually limiting them to election related activities. But there is nothing sinister about someone putting together a master database of voters. There are plenty of organizations that not only have the list but have connected it to donations and resp
  • by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Thursday November 07, 2024 @10:18PM (#64929541)

    Traditionally, things like driver's license info and voter registration info is either just another public record which is accessible to everybody, or in some places it's sort of a quasi-public record.

    In places like Florida, for instance, driver's license data is a public record anybody can get, which makes it easier for you to have your lawyer track somebody down and serve papers on them [if needed] after something like an accident. In California, driver's license data used to be a public record, but the laws were changed after a stalker used that data to track down a young actress and murder her; now you must make a special application [and pay a fee, IIRC] to get such records from the CA DMV. In other words, they're still sort of public records, but access is controlled enough that the state can be on the lookout for stalkers and such trying to use it, and the hurdles are high enough to discourage the non-serious from bothering.

    Most places do not make voter data directly available to any clown who wants it, but all government agencies, political candidates, and political orgs can get it [so they can do their mass-mailings, get-out-the-vote activities, etc] as can academics, journalists, and even businesses [but I think these entities need to go through an application process in most areas]. The trick is, the politicians can ALWAYS be counted upon to act in their self-interest... so the laws governing this stuff always seem to have a particular loophole: no matter how restrictive initial access to these databases is, there's rarely any control on what an entity that obtains the data does with it - including a lack of restrictions on them forwarding it to other entities.

  • Digitization and aggregation fundamentally change privacy and our laws have not kept up with the times which has put all people at risk.
  • ... risks to people.

    Correction: Changes the risk of stalking, to people.

    After the fascist US government has eliminated; reproductive rights, employee's rights, education, healthcare subsidies (medi-care/medi-aid), and possibly, pensions, the next step is eliminating politicians who criticize press releases from the Ministry of Truth.

    A fascist/totalitarian government may turn a blind eye to the assault or murder of 'non-persons' (Eg. Homosexual men in Russia.) but it's the dissenters or not 'normal' people in government, t

  • ..is publicly available - why is this news?

    If you have an address, then somebody needs to know it in order for you to exist ... it's not Doxxing...

    • > search for [...] party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year

      There's a reason why voting happens behind a screen. And whether a person voted or not absolutely should be protected the same way.

  • In Virginia, the political parties and candidates may purchase voting records for a nominal fee. We also allow them to observe elections and we ask the voters to state their name and address when they check in. (A voter can request to write that info down instead of saying it out loud.) This is an important part of securing the process. No secret voters, just secret ballots.

    • >"In Virginia [...]we ask the voters to state their name and address when they check in.[...] This is an important part of securing the process."

      Voters are also required to show a government ID, which is equally important. And ballots are paper and fed into a counting machine (and then captured/retained for auditing) by the voter.

      The process is quite comprehensive, logical, and good. Do note, this is a reversion back to what USED to be the norm- VA switched to all those touchscreen things that everybod

  • I'm blocked from the site. Presumably because I'm coming from a Canadian IP address.

    I guess they have nothing to hide.

  • This is the creation of the list of Enemies of the State.

    I imagine that this list will be distributed to local "militias" if the regular military is unwilling to act.

    As always, I invite any evidence to the contrary

    • >"As always, I invite any evidence to the contrary"

      I think we invite you to provide evidence of your crazy assertions, first.

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