The multibillion dollar economy of selling consumers’ and citizens’ intimate details is a thriving market that continues to grow every year.
You may not have heard of Acxiom, but the Arkansas-based data broker likely knows a lot about you. The company claims to have data on 2.5 billion people around the world. There are virtually no restrictions on companies’ ability to buy and use your personal information in the US..
How Acxiom is taking advantage of you for massive profit
This means that if someone is interested in learning about you, they can purchase your information from Acxiom without any limitations. And because data brokers are becoming increasingly intrusive, this affects every aspect of your personal life – from mortgage rates to car insurance premiums.
The truth about data brokers
– The multibillion dollar economy of selling consumers’ and citizens’ intimate details is a thriving market that continues to grow every year.
– This industry sells the personal information of individuals without their consent or knowledge, and makes billions of dollars in the process.
– The primary drivers of this economy are data brokers, who collect and sell intimate details about people’s lives for profit.
– Consumers and citizens have very little power to stop this practice, as they are often unaware that their data is being sold in the first place.
– Data brokers can make money by targeting ads at specific individuals based on their personal information.
 You are not safe online anymore
The data brokerage industry is a multibillion dollar economy of selling consumers’ and citizens’ intimate details. Much of the privacy discourse has rightly pointed fingers at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, which collect users’ information directly. However, a far broader ecosystem of buying up, licensing, selling, and sharing data exists around those platforms. Data brokerage firms are middlemen of surveillance capitalism—purchasing, aggregating, and repackaging data from a variety of other companies, all with the aim of selling or further distributing it.
This industry sells the personal information of individuals without their knowledge or consent, while they profit off of it
Data brokerage can be a threat to democracy. Without strong national privacy safeguards, entire databases of citizen information are for sale, which can be used by predatory loan companies, law enforcement agencies, or even malicious foreign actors. Federal privacy bills that don’t give sufficient attention to data brokerage will fail to tackle a significant portion of the data surveillance economy, and will leave civil rights, national security, and public-private boundaries vulnerable in the process.
Keep your data safe from the large data brokers
The large data brokers boast about their detailed data on millions or billions of people. For example, CoreLogic claims to have information on 99.9 percent of the US population. Acxiom boasts that it has data on 2.5 billion people, including information on 11,000 different data attributes. This level of data collection and aggregation allows for remarkably specific profiling.
How to protect your privacy online
Many companies collect information on individuals through various means. One way is by purchasing, licensing, or sharing agreements with third parties. For example, Oracle owns and works with over 80 data brokers according to a 2019 Financial Times report. These companies often scrape data that is publicly viewable on the internet. Websites like “people search” compile public records like property filings, court documents, and voting registrations to create databases of personal information that is then made available to the public.
Protect yourself from data brokers
At IDCleanse we focus on protecting individuals from data brokers. We do everything we can to make it harder for these companies to compile information about you and your activities. How? By blocking them from your device! Are there ways that they can get around our work? Yes, but as we protect more and more individuals their profitability will decline. We will learn their new tricks and evolve to protect against them!
Get the protection you deserve
It is a question that has been debated for many years – should you have to spend money in order to protect yourself? On one side, you have those who believe that you should never have to spend a penny if you don’t want to. And on the other side, you have those who believe that it is necessary to pay for things that offer value. In the end, it comes down to what each person believes is best. Remeber that you will pay more for a free lunch than if you had just paid for it yourself upfront.