Your Data Isn’t Private — Even If You’re In the Military.

If there is one group of Americans whose privacy should be respected — both for personal- and national-security reasons — it would be active-duty service members and military veterans. As it turns out, like the information of every other American, is shockingly easy and cheap to obtain.
Data like addresses, geolocation, contact information, ages and gender of children, and income can be useful for ad companies and major corporations trying to customize product sales and advertisements — which is why data brokers like LexisNexis, Equifax, and CoreLogic try to collect and sell this information.
The problem is that not only are these records not anonymized, but there are very few security measures in place to make sure that the data isn’t being purchased by bad actors like the Chinese Communist Party or hackers. While it’s definitely concerning that this is the case for any American, it’s especially problematic for the men and women who put their lives on the line to serve our country.
Researchers at the Sanford School of Public Policy recently decided to try to purchase some of this data for themselves, both from a U.S.-based email and IP address and from one ending in “.asian” and with an IP-address based in Singapore. They quickly found that, out of the 12 data brokers they approached, they could obtain 50,000 private records for $0.12 a record without background checks and very little attempt at verification.