The Main Revelation from the GOP Data Firm’s Leak? Political Data Is Vastly Overvalued.

Josephine Wolff wrote for Slate on the data leakage from Deep Root Analytics, the firm that compiled voter data for the Republican National Committee: 

The obvious lesson to draw from Deep Root’s exposure is that it’s unwise to post personal data on a public-facing web server. But there also a broader lesson about how the world has come to see data these days, that reveals just how desperate politicians and campaigns are for data and what a glut of worthless data there is being sold and resold across the political world. Rather than making political data analytics seem like a serious or sophisticated undertaking to effectively target individual voters, Deep Root’s data breach and what it revealed is behind the curtain makes these analytics companies look like a largely haphazard operation in which everyone is falling over themselves to buy data of any variety—the more the better—regardless of its value.