When a database of some 191 million voter records leaked just before New Year’s, the Internet freaked out over another massive data breach. Lost in the screaming was the fact that all of those millions of data points were already public information. The value to cyberthieves was solely a matter of convenience — a tidy pile of data all in one place. 

People, this is a problem. Speaking as someone who cares intensely about both data security and privacy, our tendency to react in the same way to anything remotely resembling a data breach serves little useful purpose. But it does undermine serious security and privacy efforts in many ways. 

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