What does the Elections Alberta voter information breach mean for your privacy?

Source Domain: www.cbc.ca

Privacy experts are voicing concerns for Albertans’ safety after the personal information of millions of voters in the province was made public through a searchable database.

Elections Alberta was granted an injunction on April 30 that it had sought, asking to have a pro-separatist group called the Centurion Project pull down its database containing personal information based on a voter information list.

The agency said the list was legally provided to the pro-independence Republican Party of Alberta but that it does not know how it was transferred to the Centurion Project.

More than 500 people accessed the database, according to Elections Alberta.

The RCMP, Alberta’s privacy commissioner and Elections Alberta are investigating what happened. But what does this incident mean for your personal information?

What personal information was included?

The contents of the database included information from the list of electors, said Elections Alberta. This means information such as electors’ full legal names, addresses, postal codes, telephone numbers, unique identifier numbers, electoral divisions and voting areas could have been included.

The Centurion Project, which is registered as a third-party advertiser in Alberta, is led by longtime political organizer David Parker. In a social media post on X on April 30, Parker compared the information in the database to information that can be found in phone books — something privacy experts take issue with.

To make this comparison is “downplaying the potential risk” of the breach, said Jason Woywada, the executive director of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) in Victoria.

FIPA is a non-partisan, non-profit group established to defend privacy and freedom of information rights in Canada.

Woywada told CBC News that political information, such as riding and identifier numbers, is regarded by privacy experts as some of the most sensitive information about a person — and Elections Alberta agrees,…

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