How Much Do Data Brokers Know?


Bangalore: It’s pretty curious that how companies gain and access user information for various purposes. People usually believe that accessing a person’s private information is always illegal. But is it really unlawful?

In a recent survey, that involved some of the best data brokers across U.S, they replied- "By combining data from numerous offline and online sources, data brokers have developed hidden dossiers on almost every U.S. consumers. This large scale aggregation of the personal information of hundreds of millions of American citizens raises a number of serious privacy concerns."

The survey was spearheaded by Reps. Edward Markey and Joe Barton, co-chairmen of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus.

According to Times, Acxiom has collected so much information that they say it spans over 23,000 of their servers and are perfectly legal. With this kind of rapid development, the feds are also nervous on the issues associated with security and storage.

The panel included some of the elite members of congress that includes Reps. Henry A. Waxman, Steve Chabot, G.K. Butterfield, Austin Scott, Bobby Rush, and Jan Schakowsky. Epsilon (Alliance Data Systems), Equifax, Experian, Harte-Hanks, Intelius, FICO, Merkle, Meredith Corp. was just some of the firms that were included in the survey.