Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

Respectfully to the American "this isn't that big a deal crowd": you're looking at it from the perspective that this is a commonplace occurrence in your country.

IANAL but I have filed privacy complaints in the past at both the federal and provincial level. For the last 26 years in Canada it has been illegal for personal information to be bought and sold on a whim; the person to whom the information applies is considered to be the owner and is entitled to be in control of how their information is used, and may revoke consent.

You have an entire country where institutions operate under the expectation that personally identifiable information isn't easily available like this (sans the usual data breaches). Those institutions are probably less prepared to deal with this data floating around everywhere than in a society where it is essentially a free-for-all.

The other concerning aspect of this leak is the fact that the list was shared with a group of separatists, and the data on the list is basically everything you need to fraudulently sign someone up for the separatist referendum petition. Some separatists are claiming that certain ridings have had 92.9% of eligible voters sign the petition which is highly dubious: https://x.com/RiseOfAlberta/status/2049668987307303389.

Elections Alberta has now said they are going to check for this: "Verification after today’s date will include determining if any of the seeded names from the Republican Party of Alberta’s List of Electors are contained in any incoming petition." https://www.elections.ab.ca/resources/media/news-releases/me...

My understanding is that when Elections Alberta shares the voter list with legit users (ie: sitting members of the legislature), it includes unique fictitious entries in the data. That way if there is a leak of the data, they can trace the source of the leak. Which they apparently have done.

I guess it's a form of a canary trap.

It reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them.

I can't wait for our full biometrics to be leaked every week due to every website and app trying to meet the rampant rise of global age-verification legislation.

The phone numbers in these data sets are weird and problematic, but the equivalent data in the US is usually public, and available for free to any registered candidate.

If you'rea domestic violence survivor and your info was just leaked. There are a lot of Private Investigators who look for this information for exes etc.

It was left up in an unprotected state by Alberta separatists. Intentional?

> “I’m surprised that nobody has actually called for a public inquiry into the data leak yet,” said University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley.

That's because it doesn't matter. There is no liability. You can invest all you want but at the end of day, nothing is going to come of it: no-one's going to be held responsible, no lessons are going to be learned, and we'll be reading about the next such leak in a few months' time.

This data is just generally often available in the US, https://northcarolina.votermaps.org/?#16.76/35.78541/-78.779... (agree it is bad though!)

In terms of "safety" this leak is a drop in the bucket. The greater concern would be that election systems are involved. If election information is unintentionally readable, it is also therefore potentially alterable.

Canadians generally think that buying and selling their information is illegal so it's not happening, which is why this is news.

They're right that it's illegal but definitely wrong about it not happening.

The damage to privacy from this is likely much less then the average person realizes.

(an American living in Canada's perspective)

>Security experts say a leak of Alberta’s provincial list of voters – nearly three million names, addresses and phone numbers – has created a potential public safety and political interference crisis that could have ramifications for decades.

Name, address and phone number is generally just public information here in Norway. You can literally just check the phone book for this. You can opt out of this but few people do.

How is any of this information leaking cause for concern?

Disaster? I remember when they would print up big books with everyone's address and telephone number. Then they would distribute these to everyone. While this wasn't exactly the same as the voting list, it was usually pretty close.

Smells like rat-fuckery

Other commentators are rightfully pointing out that this information is open public in other jurisdictions, and that Albertans' information is almost certainly already being shared and sold.

I believe the reason why this has become such a large news story is the tension between Alberta (and the west) and the rest of Canada. Alberta has rising separatist sentiment, a premiere who is extremely popular in Alberta and extremely unpopular outside of Alberta, and is on average more right wing compared to the rest of Canada. In both the media coverage and popular sentiment, this incident has been used to show Alberta and its government in a bad light, despite it not having anything to do with the party currently in power.

As long as it makes Alberta look bad it's an excuse to attack Danielle Smith and the UCP, and Albertians in general. Other Canadians eat up negative Alberta news like nothing else, and the media will no doubt provide them with the type of news that they crave. If this happened in any other province it would get 1/10th the coverage and outrage. Instead you have people online calling for Smith to face prison time for something she was not involved in. The media gets their views and the people get their ragebait.

So here in the Midwest USA, I can go to election commission and legally obtain the voter registration file.

It, by law, is public. Anybody who asks for it must be provided the file. Naturally the law is pre-internet and ignorant of abuses you can do.

But I'm not sure how this leak compares. Is it party affiliations and loads of PII to the point of impersonation?

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While breaches like this should not continue to happen, almost everyone’s personal information has been leaked on the internet at this point. This article seems a bit alarmist on the potential harm.