People Data Labs data broker leaks data of 170M individuals
Take action: After the breach of National Public Data, this is a second reminder that data brokers need a lot more regulation and a lot more stringent data handling processes. Ideally, they would be banned. Push your lawmakers to adopt GDPR or similar regulation protecting personal data.
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San Francisco-based data broker People Data Labs has potentially leaked over 170 million sensitive records. The leak was discovered by the Cybernews research team.
People Data Labs (PDL) is known for providing data on 1.5 billion individuals for marketing, sales, recruiting, and data enrichment purposes. The leak was caused by an unprotected Elasticsearch server which was not directly connected to PDL, indicating that a third party may have mishandled the data.
The leaked data included:
- full names,
- phone numbers,
- emails,
- location details,
- skills,
- professional summaries,
- education history,
- employment history.
PDL was previously involved in a similar data leak in 2019, where over a billion records were exposed online due to an unprotected Elasticsearch server. The current leak, marked as “Version 26.2,” might be related to the earlier incident, either as a new breach or the misuse of previously leaked data by a third party.
After the breach of National Public Data, this is a second reminder that data brokers need a lot more regulation and a lot more stringent data handling processes. Ideally, they would be banned.
