5 ms·

Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster

122 points by Teever 5mo ago

cebert 5mo ago
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.
- bonestamp2 5mo ago
  I think that's a fair take for most people in the leak, but there are people who try to keep their address a secret for their safety (investigative journalists, witnesses of crimes, judges, lawyers, police officers, etc). They often have a PO box for situations when they have to enter an address (online purchases) or they buy everything in their partner's name (including their house). When their names are leaked elsewhere, their home address is not usually in those leaks. This is a unique type of leak that could be very harmful.
uticus 5mo ago
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.
- 1attice 5mo ago
  It doesn't work that way -- it's not an open DB endpoint with misconfigured permissions, or something like that. Up here there is a custom of sharing essentially a dump of the elector's table with every political party in the early days of an election. This dump is seeded with some fake data before being released to a single political party, so if said party gets up to shenanigans, we know about it. These of course do nothing to prevent privacy violations, only to detect and punish them after the fact. Personally I think this is a dated system from a bygone era, as there is obvious risk of permanent harm via election fraud in an environment where politics actors are highly motivated. If you believe Canada is an evil woke empire from which you must protect your sons, you will likely not care about Canadian electoral law. Electorate data should be maintained by the political parties themselves, and guarded like nukes. New political parties should put in the hoofwork to build their own damn lists.
- pibaker 5mo ago
  As far as I know Canada uses paper ballots and count the votes in front of witnesses at polling places. I doubt you can sabotage the system by just meddling electronic records.
mystraline 5mo ago
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?
- justinclift 5mo ago
  Yeah, it almost sounds like the leaked information was... effectively the white pages for the area. ie name, address, and phone number
  - realo 5mo ago
    So... the far right pro-Trump separatists in Alberta suddenly have name , address and phone number of any "woke" they want to harass. What can go wrong...
  - giarc 5mo ago
    It is, but that's not the route they took. Another registered party (the Republican Party of Alberta) received the information legally, then shared it all with this group (likely illegally or at least against some rules). There's now speculation that the separatist group used it to add names to their petition since they required X number of signatures. For example, the group has claimed some communities had over 90% of electors sign the petition. Which most people would claim is really hard to physically do and also counter to the general polling in the province that finds about 25% of citizens support separation.
- masfuerte 5mo ago
  In the UK it's semi-public. The full register is available to politicians and credit reference agencies. You can inspect the register by attending in person at your local council office. You don't get a copy. There's also the edited register, which anybody can buy a copy of. You only appear in this list if you opt-in when you register. I don't know why anybody does.
buckle8017 5mo ago
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)
cf100clunk 5mo ago
It was left up in an unprotected state by Alberta separatists. Intentional?
- Teever 5mo ago
  From what I've seen it appears that it was intentional in that their motivation was to give their canvassers for the separatism petition access to the data so that they could pad their numbers for the petition.[0] They didn't mean for this to blow up in the public like this though. That part wasn't intentional. That part appears to be absolute incompetence or they just got sloppy after being treated with kid gloves by law enforcement for the past few years. [0] https://imgur.com/a/JDltJg7 https://imgur.com/a/JDltJg7
- hexagonsuns 5mo ago
  The whole thing is really suspicious. If you dig deeper on the Centurion Project, things start to get weird. The Centurion Project website has little to no information, archives of the site go back to just over a month ago, and the address and phone number are for a random UPS Store in Calgary. I got really suspicious when I started looking into Parker himself. He spews the typical "right wing" rhetoric -- Globalists bad, COVID fake etc etc... but if he actually believes that, what was he doing on the board of directors for Ditchley, which contains various ambassadors to China and France, Editor in Chief of the Globe and Mail, CEO of Desjardins, etc? https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditchley.com/people/canadian-ditchley/board https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...
  - pjc50 5mo ago
    Quite possibly all those other people believe something like that. The "elites" are vulnerable to Internet brain worms like everyone else.
    - hexagonsuns 5mo ago
      That's a bit of a stretch, it's more plausible that Mr. Parker is a plant
tptacek 5mo ago
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.
- Teever 5mo ago
  It appears that they registered as a party to get access to the data and them disseminated it publicly through a vibecoded app. While this data may generally be public in the US, it usually isn't in Canada, and there's an expectation that parties don't publish the data and it is seeded to detect that. A bigger problem is that people in Canada sign up for this list with the expectation that this data will remain reasonably private so now with this leak you have people who were willing to share their personal information to participate in the democratic process now afraid that their domestic abusers will be able to find them.[0] That really sucks. There's also the awkward aspect of this in that the Alberta separatists are seemingly backed by American interests. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-councillor-concerned-about-domestic-violence-survivors-after-private-voter-information-exposed-9.7186338 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...
  - pavel_lishin 5mo ago
    > and it is seeded to detect that. Do you mean that there are "paper town"-like entries in the dataset to make it obvious when one has leaked?
    - giarc 5mo ago
      Yes, Elections Alberta provided the list to the Republican Party of Alberta. Whenever they do this, they salt the list with fake names so that if it gets leaked, they can then determine which copy was leaked. That's how we know this republican group provided it to this "Centurion Group"
  - dblohm7 5mo ago
    I mean, it's not really optional for Canadians _not_ to sign up for the list. It's the official list of electors. If you're a citizen, you're going to end up on the voter list one way or another.
tailscaler2026 5mo ago
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.
- morkalork 5mo ago
  The Mercor leak last week or so of ids paired with audio recordings did make for the perfect voiceprint db. I'm sure it won't be the last of its kind..
lukeinator42 5mo ago
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 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/message-to-albertans-re-unauthorized-use-of-list-of-electors/ https://www.elections.ab.ca/resources/media/news-releases/me...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 5mo ago
  Sounds like an "active measures" operation.
  - hexagonsuns 5mo ago
    I'd say that sums it up nicely - I mentioned this in another comment but everything around this just smells. After doing some digging into David Parker, I found he just happened to sit on the Ditchley board of directors... strange indeed. https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditchley.com/people/canadian-ditchley/board https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...
- bpodgursky 5mo ago
  Isn't the worst case scenario here, "Alberta has to vote on whether to secede"?
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    The worst case is if that vote passes
xhkkffbf 5mo ago
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.
- tfourb 5mo ago
  At least in Germany, you'd have to opt in to your name and address being included in the phone book. So no, it's not remotely close to getting your personal details leaked publicly.
ginko 5mo ago
>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?
- Eeems 5mo ago
  This is not publicly available information in Canada. One very real concern here is that domestic abusers will now be able to find their victims: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-councillor-concerned-about-domestic-violence-survivors-after-private-voter-information-exposed-9.7186338 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...
- thunderfork 5mo ago
  The people who've opted out of the phone book for reasons like "stalkers", etc., would probably be pretty upset with this, even if they're "few people"
slopinthebag 5mo ago
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.
- rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
  Smith was friendly with Parker. Attended his wedding, did softball interviews with his wife who worked for a right wing media site.
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    See this is what I mean. "She was friendly" therefore she must be involved!!!
    - dallen33 5mo ago
      She is involved.
    - rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
      Didn't say she was involved. In this case, it seems most likely it was the weirdo separatist party that leaked the info. But she's earned the animus of many Canadians and Albertans by playing footsie with garbage like David Parker, Tucker Carlson, etc.
LurkandComment 5mo ago
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.
- LurkandComment 5mo ago
  "An Edmonton city councillor says he and his team are helping a woman facing intimate partner violence relocate with her children after her address was leaked in an alleged privacy breach by a separatist group."
- gucci-on-fleek 5mo ago
  I'm a poll worker at the Alberta elections, and this isn't quite as cataclysmic as it sounds. Even without this leak, there are tens of thousands of poll workers, and it's really easy to become a poll workers, so most people who need to keep their address a secret either use a post office box for their registration, or don't register to vote at all (since you can vote without registering in Canada [0]). That being said, it's pretty easy to get registered accidentally (I believe that the tax agency and the driver's licence agency both register you unless you opt out [1]), so this is still fairly bad. [0]: Well, technically you must register to vote in Canada, but you can always register at the ballot box, and there's a checkbox that lets you opt-out of saving your information in the database (meaning that you'd need to reregister every time you vote). [1]: You can use a post office box on both your taxes and your driver's licence, so that's usually the best solution to avoid getting accidentally registered with your real address.
mig39 5mo ago
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.
- lukan 5mo ago
  " reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them." Sounds the same to me, but are you sure they are doing it like this, or you guess?
  - cheeseprocedure 5mo ago
    This practice was confirmed by Elections Alberta: > Each electoral list legitimately released by Elections Alberta includes a certain number of fictitious — or "seeded" — names. These unique entries on each electoral list allow investigators to trace each dataset back to their source in the event of a breach. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-voter-list-complaint-9.7185287 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-vo...
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- werdnapk 5mo ago
  It's mentioned explicitly in the article: "Elections Alberta salts the electors’ lists with the names of fake voters, so if one copy of a list is leaked, the agency can trace its origins. An analysis determined the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, headed by Cam Davies, who, like Parker, has a well-documented history in Alberta as a political operative who pushes boundaries."
  - extraduder_ire 5mo ago
    Do they have enough redundant fake entries, to prevent someone comparing two or more lists to find out which entries are fake? (either multiple lists supplied to the same person, or lists supplied to different people)
cindyllm 5mo ago
[dead]
apwheele 5mo ago
This data is just generally often available in the US, https://northcarolina.votermaps.org/?#16.76/35.78541/-78.779728 https://northcarolina.votermaps.org/?#16.76/35.78541/-78.779... (agree it is bad though!)
dblohm7 5mo ago
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.
- adamiscool8 5mo ago
  In Canada, for most of the 20th century until maybe 15 years ago, your PII was in a big book that lived at everybody's house and the library unless you specifically opted out.
  - tensor 5mo ago
    Thank goodness Canada doesn't use its past mistakes as a bar that it's ok to go back to.
  - rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
    And?
    - adamiscool8 5mo ago
      It was a public safety disaster that the country is still trying to recover from.
      - rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
        Surely you comprehend the difference here.
kleiba2 5mo ago
> “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.
morkalork 5mo ago
Smells like rat-fuckery
- mig39 5mo ago
  This is why rats are illegal in Alberta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta

122 points by Teever 5mo ago

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.

bonestamp2 5mo ago
I think that's a fair take for most people in the leak, but there are people who try to keep their address a secret for their safety (investigative journalists, witnesses of crimes, judges, lawyers, police officers, etc). They often have a PO box for situations when they have to enter an address (online purchases) or they buy everything in their partner's name (including their house). When their names are leaked elsewhere, their home address is not usually in those leaks. This is a unique type of leak that could be very harmful.

uticus 5mo ago

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.

1attice 5mo ago
It doesn't work that way -- it's not an open DB endpoint with misconfigured permissions, or something like that. Up here there is a custom of sharing essentially a dump of the elector's table with every political party in the early days of an election. This dump is seeded with some fake data before being released to a single political party, so if said party gets up to shenanigans, we know about it. These of course do nothing to prevent privacy violations, only to detect and punish them after the fact. Personally I think this is a dated system from a bygone era, as there is obvious risk of permanent harm via election fraud in an environment where politics actors are highly motivated. If you believe Canada is an evil woke empire from which you must protect your sons, you will likely not care about Canadian electoral law. Electorate data should be maintained by the political parties themselves, and guarded like nukes. New political parties should put in the hoofwork to build their own damn lists.
pibaker 5mo ago
As far as I know Canada uses paper ballots and count the votes in front of witnesses at polling places. I doubt you can sabotage the system by just meddling electronic records.

mystraline 5mo ago

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?

justinclift 5mo ago
Yeah, it almost sounds like the leaked information was... effectively the white pages for the area. ie name, address, and phone number
- realo 5mo ago
  So... the far right pro-Trump separatists in Alberta suddenly have name , address and phone number of any "woke" they want to harass. What can go wrong...
- giarc 5mo ago
  It is, but that's not the route they took. Another registered party (the Republican Party of Alberta) received the information legally, then shared it all with this group (likely illegally or at least against some rules). There's now speculation that the separatist group used it to add names to their petition since they required X number of signatures. For example, the group has claimed some communities had over 90% of electors sign the petition. Which most people would claim is really hard to physically do and also counter to the general polling in the province that finds about 25% of citizens support separation.
masfuerte 5mo ago
In the UK it's semi-public. The full register is available to politicians and credit reference agencies. You can inspect the register by attending in person at your local council office. You don't get a copy. There's also the edited register, which anybody can buy a copy of. You only appear in this list if you opt-in when you register. I don't know why anybody does.

buckle8017 5mo ago

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)

cf100clunk 5mo ago

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

Teever 5mo ago
From what I've seen it appears that it was intentional in that their motivation was to give their canvassers for the separatism petition access to the data so that they could pad their numbers for the petition.[0] They didn't mean for this to blow up in the public like this though. That part wasn't intentional. That part appears to be absolute incompetence or they just got sloppy after being treated with kid gloves by law enforcement for the past few years. [0] https://imgur.com/a/JDltJg7 https://imgur.com/a/JDltJg7
hexagonsuns 5mo ago
The whole thing is really suspicious. If you dig deeper on the Centurion Project, things start to get weird. The Centurion Project website has little to no information, archives of the site go back to just over a month ago, and the address and phone number are for a random UPS Store in Calgary. I got really suspicious when I started looking into Parker himself. He spews the typical "right wing" rhetoric -- Globalists bad, COVID fake etc etc... but if he actually believes that, what was he doing on the board of directors for Ditchley, which contains various ambassadors to China and France, Editor in Chief of the Globe and Mail, CEO of Desjardins, etc? https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditchley.com/people/canadian-ditchley/board https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...
- pjc50 5mo ago
  Quite possibly all those other people believe something like that. The "elites" are vulnerable to Internet brain worms like everyone else.
  - hexagonsuns 5mo ago
    That's a bit of a stretch, it's more plausible that Mr. Parker is a plant

tptacek 5mo ago

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.

Teever 5mo ago
It appears that they registered as a party to get access to the data and them disseminated it publicly through a vibecoded app. While this data may generally be public in the US, it usually isn't in Canada, and there's an expectation that parties don't publish the data and it is seeded to detect that. A bigger problem is that people in Canada sign up for this list with the expectation that this data will remain reasonably private so now with this leak you have people who were willing to share their personal information to participate in the democratic process now afraid that their domestic abusers will be able to find them.[0] That really sucks. There's also the awkward aspect of this in that the Alberta separatists are seemingly backed by American interests. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-councillor-concerned-about-domestic-violence-survivors-after-private-voter-information-exposed-9.7186338 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...
- pavel_lishin 5mo ago
  > and it is seeded to detect that. Do you mean that there are "paper town"-like entries in the dataset to make it obvious when one has leaked?
  - giarc 5mo ago
    Yes, Elections Alberta provided the list to the Republican Party of Alberta. Whenever they do this, they salt the list with fake names so that if it gets leaked, they can then determine which copy was leaked. That's how we know this republican group provided it to this "Centurion Group"
- dblohm7 5mo ago
  I mean, it's not really optional for Canadians _not_ to sign up for the list. It's the official list of electors. If you're a citizen, you're going to end up on the voter list one way or another.

tailscaler2026 5mo ago

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.

morkalork 5mo ago
The Mercor leak last week or so of ids paired with audio recordings did make for the perfect voiceprint db. I'm sure it won't be the last of its kind..

lukeinator42 5mo ago

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 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/message-to-albertans-re-unauthorized-use-of-list-of-electors/ https://www.elections.ab.ca/resources/media/news-releases/me...

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 5mo ago
Sounds like an "active measures" operation.
- hexagonsuns 5mo ago
  I'd say that sums it up nicely - I mentioned this in another comment but everything around this just smells. After doing some digging into David Parker, I found he just happened to sit on the Ditchley board of directors... strange indeed. https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditchley.com/people/canadian-ditchley/board https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...
bpodgursky 5mo ago
Isn't the worst case scenario here, "Alberta has to vote on whether to secede"?
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  The worst case is if that vote passes

xhkkffbf 5mo ago

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.

tfourb 5mo ago
At least in Germany, you'd have to opt in to your name and address being included in the phone book. So no, it's not remotely close to getting your personal details leaked publicly.

ginko 5mo ago

>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?

Eeems 5mo ago
This is not publicly available information in Canada. One very real concern here is that domestic abusers will now be able to find their victims: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-councillor-concerned-about-domestic-violence-survivors-after-private-voter-information-exposed-9.7186338 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...
thunderfork 5mo ago
The people who've opted out of the phone book for reasons like "stalkers", etc., would probably be pretty upset with this, even if they're "few people"

slopinthebag 5mo ago

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.

rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
Smith was friendly with Parker. Attended his wedding, did softball interviews with his wife who worked for a right wing media site.
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  See this is what I mean. "She was friendly" therefore she must be involved!!!
  - dallen33 5mo ago
    She is involved.
  - rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
    Didn't say she was involved. In this case, it seems most likely it was the weirdo separatist party that leaked the info. But she's earned the animus of many Canadians and Albertans by playing footsie with garbage like David Parker, Tucker Carlson, etc.

LurkandComment 5mo ago

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.

LurkandComment 5mo ago
"An Edmonton city councillor says he and his team are helping a woman facing intimate partner violence relocate with her children after her address was leaked in an alleged privacy breach by a separatist group."
gucci-on-fleek 5mo ago
I'm a poll worker at the Alberta elections, and this isn't quite as cataclysmic as it sounds. Even without this leak, there are tens of thousands of poll workers, and it's really easy to become a poll workers, so most people who need to keep their address a secret either use a post office box for their registration, or don't register to vote at all (since you can vote without registering in Canada [0]). That being said, it's pretty easy to get registered accidentally (I believe that the tax agency and the driver's licence agency both register you unless you opt out [1]), so this is still fairly bad. [0]: Well, technically you must register to vote in Canada, but you can always register at the ballot box, and there's a checkbox that lets you opt-out of saving your information in the database (meaning that you'd need to reregister every time you vote). [1]: You can use a post office box on both your taxes and your driver's licence, so that's usually the best solution to avoid getting accidentally registered with your real address.

mig39 5mo ago

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.

lukan 5mo ago
" reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them." Sounds the same to me, but are you sure they are doing it like this, or you guess?
- cheeseprocedure 5mo ago
  This practice was confirmed by Elections Alberta: > Each electoral list legitimately released by Elections Alberta includes a certain number of fictitious — or "seeded" — names. These unique entries on each electoral list allow investigators to trace each dataset back to their source in the event of a breach. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-voter-list-complaint-9.7185287 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/elections-alberta-vo...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
werdnapk 5mo ago
It's mentioned explicitly in the article: "Elections Alberta salts the electors’ lists with the names of fake voters, so if one copy of a list is leaked, the agency can trace its origins. An analysis determined the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, headed by Cam Davies, who, like Parker, has a well-documented history in Alberta as a political operative who pushes boundaries."
- extraduder_ire 5mo ago
  Do they have enough redundant fake entries, to prevent someone comparing two or more lists to find out which entries are fake? (either multiple lists supplied to the same person, or lists supplied to different people)

cindyllm 5mo ago

[dead]

apwheele 5mo ago

This data is just generally often available in the US, https://northcarolina.votermaps.org/?#16.76/35.78541/-78.779728 https://northcarolina.votermaps.org/?#16.76/35.78541/-78.779... (agree it is bad though!)

dblohm7 5mo ago

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.

adamiscool8 5mo ago
In Canada, for most of the 20th century until maybe 15 years ago, your PII was in a big book that lived at everybody's house and the library unless you specifically opted out.
- tensor 5mo ago
  Thank goodness Canada doesn't use its past mistakes as a bar that it's ok to go back to.
- rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
  And?
  - adamiscool8 5mo ago
    It was a public safety disaster that the country is still trying to recover from.
    - rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
      Surely you comprehend the difference here.

kleiba2 5mo ago

> “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.

morkalork 5mo ago

Smells like rat-fuckery

mig39 5mo ago
This is why rats are illegal in Alberta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta