Data Brokers Put Your Digital Identity in Their “Banks”

Data brokers is a very lucrative business.

Here, at Finnish television TV1 (8.05 minutes in), I am explaining that 1 post on social media or 1 search on a search engine is usually not the problem for your digital identity. The real problem is the puzzle about you collected by the growing lucrative industry of data brokers.

Data brokers knows a lot about you, such as your vacation dreams, you health worries and your shopping habits. You can read much more about data brokers here at the brilliant round up at Electronic Frontier Foundation, who explains that

“Data brokers are companies that trade in information on people.”

Data brokers are poorly regulations, as the New York Times explains here. The authorities obviously know very little about what the brokers collect about us, and in July last year some members of the House of Representatives sent letters to 9 major data brokers, Axciom, Epsilon, Equifax, Experian, Harte/Hanks, Intelius, Fico, Merkle and Meredith Corp (why not Datalogix?) asking what they collect. The letters and their vague responses can be read here.

Axciom, for example, disclosed that they collect date of birth/age, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, language preference, length of residence, home value, home characteristics, marital status, presence of children and number of residents in the household, education, occupation and political party. And according to the CNN Axciom defended their collection saying it is legal (in the US) and that is serves customers with better advertising.

But their answers were far from enough for the authorities. The FTC started an investigation last December.

Our advice is: Use some of our suggested tools like pseudonyms on social media, where you are not strictly professional, use blockers like DNTme from abine.com or disconnect.me, use VPN services to hide your IP-address and think before you post anything on social media, as everything you post is public.