Well just fabulous. The BERN app let everyone see voter info.

[better]

46. Yeah this does seem quite fishy. Doesn't seem to be a real concern at all.

For starters, all indications are that the "personal information" being referenced is entirely from public voter information, i.e. voter registrations. This is about like criticizing a campaign for making it possible to look up someone's phone number, despite the fact that all they're actually doing is retrieving and displaying results from the white pages.

And for those who don't know how databases work, here's why your "voter id" being visible isn't necessarily anything to worry about.

Relational databases work by linking entries in multiple tables by the use of what are called foreign keys. Often, the key used is also the primary key, which is usually an automatically-incremented integer, with an enforced unique constraint. It's what allows you to make sure you're accessing the correct "John Doe" instead of all the wrong ones. It also serves the purpose of allowing the ID itself to be publicly visible without revealing any information related to that ID that should not be public.

Take for example a database with two tables, called voters and voter_demographics.

In voters table, columns:

voterID, voterName, partyAffiliation, registrationDate

In voter_demographics table, columns:

voterID, address, phone, etc...

The relationship between the two tables is on the voterID column in each table. But in order to access information from the demographics table, you either have to have user access to that table, or a web developer has to have created a view displaying information from that table, using credentials that do have that access.

One of the primary purposes of using relationships in database design is to be able to segment data such that certain classes of information are more broadly accessible than others. By storing private information in the demographics table, and public information in the voters table, it is possible to grant access to only the public information, by granting access to only the related table.

Unless you have the credentials for a database user with permissions to the demographics table or such a view exposing that data actually exists publicly, the voterID being visible while inspecting web traffic doesn't actually mean anything. It's just a value that is passed by the application to tell the database for which voter to display whatever information is allowed to be displayed. And what is allowed to be displayed can vary depending upon who and where you are.