The Securities and Exchange Commission is collecting personal information about the buyers and sellers of every single stock trade in the United States and is holding that information for the perusal of thousands of bureaucrats and any hacker who is able to break into the database. This database, called the Consolidated Audit Trail, collects information such as the buyer’s and seller’s address, date or year of birth, and Social Security number. This invasion of privacy affects at least 61% of people in the U.S.
The database is a disaster for the privacy of millions of people. In terms of the amount of information collected, only the National Security Agency’s data-collection program is larger, and that database is not focused on people. What is worse, these types of databases are not secure. In 2016, hackers made off with over $4 million by trading on at least 157 nonpublic earnings releases from the SEC’s very own Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system.
