The internet is an extremely useful tool that can be used to do everything from streaming movies to buying groceries. With all the capabilities of this digital Swiss army knife the growth of internet users is constantly increasing. With 3.2 billion people worldwide who have lives online, the amount of data available is enormous(ICT). Data brokers have capitalized on the vast amount of data.
Data Brokers are companies that collect and aggregate data from the population and then sell data on people to other companies. The sources that data brokers use to collect data are government records, other publicly available records and commercial sources (Mehlman, 2015). Government records (census, MVA records, criminal records) and publicly available records (publicly available media as well as social media profiles) are easily obtained but majority of information is collected by the third source. Certain websites collect data on their users in order to analyze the traffic and improve their services. Data Brokers buy this information from the companies that operate these websites. Data brokers mainly collect metadata on demographics like age, gender, occupation, political alignment but they can also purchase more personal data from the commercial sources. Locations that are frequented, medical and drug records, buying practices are constantly sold to data brokers by companies that collect this kind of information. (Mehlman, 2015) Companies are allowed to collect and sell this information to data brokers because of their privacy policies (Yeh, 2018). Whenever a client accesses the company’s website, they automatically sign the companies privacy policy. Data brokers sell their aggregated data to various enterprise that use it for many reasons. The main reason to buy from data brokers is to have targeted ads. Direct sale companies use the information to advertise certain products in certain locations and also to see what the consumers want. Political campaigns also use information in the same way, the politician knows what policies are popular and will get votes. Another major client of data brokers are law enforcement agencies. Officers use the data to prevent crimes and determine the real criminals using programs that easily monitor social media (Gellman and Dixon, 2013). The data broker industry is constantly growing along with the expanding internet. The issue of privacy is becoming a very import demand for people online, but data brokers claim that the collection of data only makes life better for everyone. |