Having state and county governments that appear to be actively trying to go backwards and re-enter the 20th century, one of the many things that has come up is they aren’t protecting voter vital info data from criminals! Joy, right? Welcome to Florida, a third-world country state. But most of y'all other states aren't too much better on this one—keep reading below.
Okay, first, let’s make sure everyone understands what the dark web is. To quote Norton Security, “The dark web is a part of the internet where cybercriminals buy and sell personal information.” It’s the shadow world of the criminals. You cannot find dark websites through an internet search engine like Google—it would be like trying to find a meth dealer in the Yellow Pages. If you want more info, click Google One’s website.
Now, onward. Google One Storage Plans recently offered a new tool: dark web search. The scan ran and below is the list that came up.
My voter registration information has been for sale on the dark web since August 2022 on the website “Leaked Florida Voter Information”. Wow, lovely, huh? BTW, Norton’s dark web scan only found that my email went up on the dark web from a hack of Café Press, so that’s how much theirs is worth!
(Beneath all the black I put in the above image is my real information. I'm not helping criminals by posting my real stuff here despite Florida has already done it.)
Needless to say, I have entirely freaked the f*ck out, changing passwords into some alpha-numeric ridiculously long craziness and canceling everything including eBay, which I haven’t used for years—PayPal went long ago when I received phishing crap about purchasing bitcoins for thousands of dollars. But I cannot expunge myself from Florida’s voting registration—good thing I never put my phone number on it or that would be for sale too and I'd go homicidal if I received annoying phone calls. I began to receive the PayPal Bitcoin emails once my voter registration info went up for sale and I keep receiving them from different source email addresses.
Changing passwords will not help with the voter registration information being sold! This vital info makes it easy for criminals to gain our social security numbers, something most of the US government levels seem incapable of comprehending. They are more concerned with how these hacks affect voting and foreign hacking. Um, what are foreigners going to do—elect an asshole into our government?
A must-read article from Privacy Affairs "Voter Records of 107 Million Americans are Sold on the Dark Web" because your state may be on it and therefore, if you are registered to vote, your info may be for sale on the dark web too. The article found that Florida is "Arguably The Most Dangerous Place to Be a Voter”. Fabulous. Now what do over 12 million of us do?
One of the best ways to protect your identity is to f*ck up your credit. Identity thieves would have to repair your credit in order to gain credit lines through it. That’s what I did. LOL!
You can contact the three credit bureau agencies, and providing they don’t use a security question pertaining to the credit card number you had fifteen years ago (one of them is doing that), then you can freeze any new credit lines from being taken out.
However, this is only for credit line thievery, not for a host of other things they can use us for and that’s the scary part. It doesn’t help with someone getting a driver’s license under your name but their face or using your rental history to rent a place under you. As far as I am aware, there is nothing to protect us from this.
However, if you live in Florida, the state and county governments believe we are in the 20th century, and therefore these threats do not exist yet, so don’t worry about it for a few more decades!