- Dec 30, 2012
- 4,809
These days, it’s nearly impossible for the average consumer to expect anonymity online or off — at least not without a bit of legwork first.
Data brokers —companies that specialize in gathering information about consumers and selling it to third parties — have turned the collection and sale of publicly available personal information into a multibillion-dollar industry.
At any given moment, hundreds of these companies are analyzing everything from our ZIP code, income and ethnicity to our taste in music, our driving record and how often we search for funny cat videos. They then take that information, sort us into groups and make a fortune selling it to marketers, employers, charities, government agencies, and other businesses. As to what they do with this information, the details can be hazy. Some data are sold to marketers, but other information can be used to screen prospective employees, run background checks, detect identity theft, or come up with a dubious alternative to traditional credit scores.
There’s little we know about data tracking and the companies that do it. Neither regulators nor lawmakers have managed to wrap their heads around data brokers quite yet.
What we do know, based on reports by the Government Accountability Office, Federal Trade Commission, and the World Privacy Forum, a consumer advocacy group, is that it’s nearly impossible for consumers to control the information that’s been collected about them. The FTC will publish the results of its investigation of nine major data brokers later this year.
“A lot of this [tracking] is happening in a benign way, but to me the security problem is what makes the privacy problem so much worse,” Avi Ruben, a professor of computer science at John Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute, told Yahoo Finance. “If every company collecting this data was capable of securing it 100%, then we could take some comfort. But they can’t.”
We talked with a few experts to find out steps consumers can take on their own to keep their information and browsing habits as private as possible.
More
