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ethics Guide

unSeen Cyberazzi

A data broker or data aggregator is a company that ac- is stored about you, but in practice it is difficult to learn how
quires and purchases consumer and other data from public re- to request your data. Further, the process for doing so is tor-
cords, retailers, Internet cookie vendors, social media trackers, turous, and ultimately, the data that is released is limited to
and other sources and uses it to create business intelligence innocuous data such as your name, phone numbers, and
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that it sells to companies and the government. Two prominent current and former addresses. Without an easy means for
data brokers are Datalogix and Acxiom Corporation. viewing all of your data, it is impossible to verify its accuracy.
Data brokers gather vast amounts of data. According to Of even greater concern, however, is the unknown pro-
The New York Times, as of June 2012, Acxiom Corporation cessing of such data. What business intelligence techniques
had used 23,000 servers to process data of 50 trillion trans- are employed by these companies? What are the accu-
actions on 500 million consumers. It stores more than racy and reliability of those techniques? If the data broker
15,000 data points on some consumers. 8 errs in predicting that you’ll buy a pizza on Friday night,
So, what do data brokers do with all this data? If who cares? But if the data broker errs in predicting that
you buy pizza online on Friday nights only when you you’re a terrorist, it matters. Data brokers are silent on these
receive a substantial discount, a data broker (or the questions.
broker’s customer) knows to
send you a discount pizza cou-
pon Friday morning. If you use
a customer loyalty card at your
local grocery store and regu-
larly buy, say, large bags of po-
tato chips, the data broker or
its customer will send you cou-
pons for more potato chips or
for a second snack product that
is frequently purchased by po-
tato chip consumers. Or, as dis-
cussed in Q1, if you suddenly
start buying certain lotions and
vitamins, the data broker will
know you’re pregnant.
Federal law provides strict
limits on gathering and using
medical and credit data. For other
data, however, the possibilities are
unlimited. In theory, data brokers
enable you to view the data that
Source: Sergey Nivens/Fotolia
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Natasha Singer, “Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome,” The New York Times, last modified June 16, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/
technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html.
9 Lois Beckett, “What Data Brokers Know About You,” RealClearTechnology, last modified March 8, 2013, www.realcleartechnology.com/
articles/2013/03/08/what_data_brokers_know_about_you_326.html.
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