Data Brokers are Selling Sensitive Military Data for as Little as $0.12 Per Record

Wednesday - November 8 2023, 03:06 UTC - 1 year ago

Data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about active-duty military members and veterans for as little as $0.12 per record. This data includes their names, home addresses, geolocation, net worth, and religion, and information about their children and health conditions. The researchers are calling on Congress to pass a comprehensive privacy law that restricts the data broker industry.

For as little as $0.12 per record, data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about active-duty military members and veterans, including their names, home addresses, geolocation, net worth, and religion, and information about their children and health conditions. The year-long study, which was funded in part by the US Military Academy at West Point, highlights the extreme privacy and national security risks created by data brokers .

These companies are part of a shadowy multibillion-dollar industry that collects, aggregates, buys, and sells data, practices that are currently legal in the US. Many brokers advertise that they have hundreds of individual data points on each person in their database, and the industry has been criticized for exacerbating the erosion of personal and consumer privacy. The researchers say they were "shocked" at the ease with which they were able to obtain highly sensitive data about members of the military .

"In practice, it seems as though anyone with an email address, a bank account, and a few hundred dollars could acquire the same type of data that we did," Hayley Barton, a coauthor of the study and a graduate student researcher, says.The authors hope the study serves as a warning to US lawmakers and are calling on Congress to pass a comprehensive privacy law that restricts the data broker industry .

"What we really need is regulation of this ecosystem," the report’s lead author, privacy researcher Justin Sherman, says. "At the end of the day, this is a congressional problem—because we need new legal authorities to deal with these risks, and regulatory agencies need more resources."Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has reviewed the report and serves on the US Senate Armed Services Committee, broadly agrees .

"Data brokers are selling sensitive information about service members and their families for nickels without considering the serious national security risks," Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement to MIT Technology Review. "This report makes clear that we need real guardrails to protect the personal data of service members, veterans, and their families." Selling sensitive information The danger posed by commercially available data about active-duty military members is not a new problem .

For example, in 2018, data about running routes recorded in the fitness tracking app Strava revealed the location of US military bases and patrol routes overseas. The team first scraped the web to get a view of how many of the thousands of data brokers in the US advertise the availability of personal data on the country’s service members. It found "7,728 hits for the word ‘military’ and 6,776 hits for the word ‘veteran’ across 533 data brokers’ websites," according to the paper .

Major data brokers including Oracle, Equifax, Experian, CoreLogic, LexisNexis, and Verisk all advertised military-related data. Next, the researchers contacted 12 of those brokers about purchasing the data. They "found a lack of robust controls when asking some data brokers about buying data on the U.S. military and when actually purchasing data from some data brokers such as identity veification, age verification, and payment verifications," according to their paper .