The various databases containing 198 million records on American voters from all political parties were found stored on an open Amazon S3 storage server owned by a Republican data analytics firm, Deep Root Analytics.
This leak shines a spotlight on the Republicans' multi-million dollar effort to better target potential voters by utilizing big data.
The exposed records include files provided by Data Trust, a data warehouse created by the GOP to serve as its exclusive data provider of voter records.
The company sells and supplies voter data to political candidates, who rely on access to the data in order to shape their campaigns.
Vickery, who we profiled on ZDNet earlier this year, found 87 million Mexican voter records in an exposed database in 2016.
He was also responsible for discovering several US voter databases online totaling 18 million voters, and the state of Louisiana's entire database of 2.9 million voters.
Deep Root's exposure also appears to be larger than the 191 million voter records exposed by i360, a data company, in late 2015, and another massive leak of 154 million voter records a year later. »
