Data brokers are like elderly women who gossip - they are always listening and tend to invade your privacy.

As a user, what should you know about data brokers and their privacy concerns?👇

First, the definition:

A data broker is a business that collects, cleans, and processes personal information about consumers and sells that information to other organizations.

And yes, it sounds shifty to me as well.

LET'S BREAK DOWN WHAT THIS MEANS.

A broker may collect your purchasing habits from a retailer. Then, they might gather your religion and smoking habits from a dating app.

Independent of one another, this data may be useless, but together, paired with other pieces of information about you from other sources, these pieces of data enable brokers to create a profile of who you are.

Typically, brokers create profiles of individuals for marketing purposes and sell them to businesses that want to target their advertisements and special offers.

WHERE DO THEY GET ALL THIS DATA?

Their sources range from public to non-public including, but not limited to:

📄 Public records: birth certificates, marriage licenses, divorce records, voter registration information, court records, bankruptcy records, motor vehicle records, and census data

🍪 Third-party companies: This is often in the form of website cookies. When you go to a website and consent to sharing your data, chances are your data will end up being sold to a data broker

💻 Web browsing history: Every time you use a search engine or an app, take a quiz to see what Harry Potter house you below to, enter a sweepstake, or just visit websites, you are leaving an electronic trail of activity

💸 Buying more data: They could buy your information from credit card companies (purchase history), apps on your phone, social networking sites, retailers, and more

PRIVACY CONCERNS?

You betcha! And I have 3 of them:

1) Even though brokers claim the data they have is anonymized, researchers found it's quite simple to de-anonymize it.

2) Think about all the times you’ve hastily selected “accept” to privacy and cookie policies.

While it might not be illegal, it certainly seems unethical. By clicking accept, we hand over the rights of our data of the website's choosing.

3) Privacy laws are not where they need to be to regulate data brokers and put users' needs at the forefront.

TLDR;

In sum, data brokers are like my grandma - listening & invading privacy

However, my grandma does it out of love, and sadly, I can't say the same for data brokers

Privacy is a concern with brokers for 3 reasons:

• Non-anonymized data

• Unethical consent

• Gaps in laws

Enjoy learning about privacy and how your data is collected/used.

Follow me at @_digitalanna :)

What privacy topics are you looking to learn more about? Leave me a comment.