Use and Abuse of Personal Information -- Politics Edition
Black Hat USA 2025 · Day 1 · Briefings
Virginia Tech researchers created 1,400 fake identities and enrolled them with candidates across the 2024 U.S. election cycle — from primary through six months post-election — to systematically measure how politicians collect, use, and share personal information. They received over 34,000 phone calls, 7,000 voicemails, and hundreds of thousands of emails. Key findings: Democrats sent nearly twice as many emails as Republicans; Joe Biden averaged 10.2 emails per day per account; roughly 5% of candidates provably shared contact data with third parties; and political campaigns treat personal data as a disposable commodity rather than a privacy-protected asset. ---
AI review
Virginia Tech ran a legitimately clever empirical study — 1,400 fake identities, 18 months, 34,000 calls — and the data on PII sharing and phone spam is genuinely interesting. But this is a privacy research paper pretending to be a security talk, and Black Hat is an odd venue for finding that 'donate' is the most important word in campaign emails.