One data target that puts all Americans at risk.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. Remember when President Trump tried to ban Tik-Toc, he said at the time that the data of American

users risked falling into the hands of Chinese authorities who have ties to the apps

owners.

A judge blocked the ban, but even if he hadn't, experts say so much of our information is available

to buy elsewhere from run-of-the-mill data brokers.

And that can have big consequences for national security,

especially when it comes to information

on members of the military.

Justin Sherman heads a team at Duke that tried buying just that kind of data, and he says it wasn't that hard.

We were able to purchase a range of data about active duty military service members, their families, their

acquaintances, as well as some veterans. This spans data about people's health conditions, data about people's finances, are they in debt, do they have a mortgage,

as well as pretty personal demographic information such as your religion or how many

children you have in the home and what the estimated ages of those children are and

so we really walked away with the sense that

this data is in many cases very clearly linked to a person by name and this is also a lot of sensitive

data that many service members probably don't suspect is out there for sale by

these data brokers. So to do this Justin your team

approached 12 different data brokers to buy data first using a US-based

website and then later with a dot Asia domain name. Why that domain name?

We wanted to see if there's a difference between contacting a data broker with a US website

...