Washington

Highly sensitive information of the US military personnel, including their families, and veterans, is being sold online in pennies and dimes per person, a new study from Duke University has found.

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The data includes the personnel's health status, details of their family members, their home address, and work location. The university’s brokerage research project was able to purchase these information from sites that collect and sell personal information.

Some of those sites curated the search criteria to military demographics like branch, duty and veteran status, the report noted.

The research team was able to buy the data for as cheap as $0.12 per record.

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US national security at risk

They also found that a vast unregulated, multibillion-dollar industry is thriving online in the US that spans from major credit reporting agencies to obscure analytics firms to mobile apps that quietly sell users’ location data.

“It was way too easy to obtain this data: a simple domain, 12 cents a service member, and no background checks on our purchases,” Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy who runs its data brokerage research project, told CNN.

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“If our research team, subject to university research ethics and privacy processes, could do this in an academic study, a foreign adversary could get data in a heartbeat to profile, blackmail, or target military personnel,” Sherman added.

These data are usually purchased by data brokers to conduct legitimate information surveys, such as background checks and credit checks.

However, there has been a growing concern that a foreign intelligence service can trace the whereabouts and expose vulnerabilities of US military members simply by shopping for the information online, as the sites that sell these information online don't conduct background checks on potential buyers.

Govt yet to act on it 

The government has already taken note of it, with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saying in August that it was exploring new rules that would bar data brokers from selling certain information except for specific circumstances.

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The Federal Trade Commission is currently considering new regulations to crack down on data brokers, CNN reported.

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“We cannot comment on any company’s specific practices,” an FTC spokesperson told the news outlet.

“However, we have repeatedly raised concerns about the practices of data brokers and their potential impact on consumer privacy. We are prepared to take action against any company that fails to safeguard consumer data and follow applicable laws such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act.”