Update: The Florida Department of State issued a statement on March 31 confirming the breach. That statement appears elsewhere on this site. Under the language of their statute, addresses are not considered “confidential” information, and the state has asked DataBreaches.net to make clear that this did not involve confidential information, as “confidential” is defined by the state.
Original story:
DataBreaches.net received a link to flvoters.com/breach.html, where this notice appears:
On 17 March 2015, the Florida Secretary of State’s office sent out the copies of the voter list (on compact discs) with all the confidential addresses intact.
Thousands of Florida voters have confidential, or “suppressed” addresses for their protection. These include crime victims hiding from their attackers; and cops. See this PDF for more details.
On 17 March 2015, they realized the blunder and telephoned us to let us know the disc in the mail “has some issues with it, and is not to be used.”
The social security numbers and driver license numbers were not included.
It is our impression that the State of Florida does not send these discs out one at a time, but in one monthly batch, so everybody who ordered the March monthly edition (containing data as of 28 February 2015) received the confidential addresses.
We are not interested in publishing the confidential addresses, and we returned the disc once we determined what the “issues” were. In fact, we update each voter’s individual detail record with each monthly update, but once a record is flagged as suppressed by the State of Florida, we stop displaying that record on our website pages.
However, we feel that the subjects of the breached data should be allowed to know, so we make this announcement. We don’t know what the other people receiving the confidential data will do with it. (See: Jeb Bush Aides Consider Data-Selling Plan.)
To put this data breach in perspective, let us just say that the Michigan voter list has no such provision for exclusions, and contains the addresses of every registered voter in that State.
We are still waiting for the new, proper disc to arrive, so we can update the website.
According to labor statistics, there are over 36,000 police and sheriff’s officers in Florida. If all of them have to-be-suppressed records, then this breach may have impacted tens of thousands.
Not finding any disclosure on the Florida Department of State’s website, DataBreaches.net e-mailed the Florida Department of State yesterday to ask for an explanation of how the breach occurred, how many people were affected and whether they’re being notified or offered any protective services, and what DOS did in response to the breach to recall or secure the CDs that had already been sent out.