WBEZ Chicago: GOP-tilted websites showed where Illinois judges live despite a law that protects their privacy

John Davisson, director of litigation for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says the publication of voter registration records can have a chilling effect on the democratic process. 

“If you are worried that you are going to face some sort of negative consequence … as a result of signing up to vote and giving the state that that personal information necessary to vote, you’re just going to be less likely to do it,” Davisson said. 

“This case is exactly why many states impose access- and use-restrictions on personal voter data. It exemplifies the threat that can flow from misuse of that information for purposes other than civic participation and voter roll maintenance.” 

…“The data broker industry is a multi-billion dollar industry,” Davisson said. “It includes a whole range of companies — some more or less scrupulous — and many of the big brokers out there engage in large-scale scraping of personal information from websites and don’t apply a lot of scrutiny to where that information came from and whether it was wrongfully disclosed in the first instance.” 

Davisson said “there’s a lot of unregulated conduct and activity in the data broker industry.” He said state and federal regulators are starting to pay more attention to these issues “but it is still largely the Wild West. So the disclosure of voter registration information online can absolutely feed into that ecosystem.” 

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