Data brokers know where you are and want to sell that to Intel

At the end July Catholic priest he resigned from the church, after pulling out Catholic news websites The Pillar purchase data located by the data broker about the use of Grindr. The event not only shows how people can use Grindr data against members of the LGBTQ community. He also highlighted the risks of this large, shadow and unregulated data intermediation industry selling Americans real-time locations to the best seller.

In the news report For the Cyber ​​Policy Program at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, I analyzed 10 major data brokers and sensitive data that they advertise. They explicitly and explicitly claim data on the demographic characteristics of individuals (from race to gender to income level) and political priorities and beliefs (including support for the NAACP, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the LGBTQ National Task Force) and the current U.S. government. and the military. Many of these companies also market another worrying product: American locations.

Acxiom, one of the greatest intermediaries data on trillions people from all over the world, announces About “Location-based device data”. Do you need to know that someone has visited a location several times in the last 30 days, such as a church, a therapist’s office, or their former home? They cover you, according to a company marketing document. What about other perspectives based on people’s locations? Check the data of the marketing company NinthDecimal, according to a 2018 technical file, An Acxiom “partner” that provides “information about the location and location context of mobile devices”. The military, Acxiom says, can also be found: It offers “Soldier Verification and Location (Expanded but Missing Basically)” as part of a commercial work for credit card issuers and retail banks.

LexisNexis, another behemoth, announces Ability to “determine a person’s current location” using the latest records of human consent.Experience completely announces mobile location data. Oracle, in the last decade, turned to data mediation. announces marketing services based on the user’s real-time location. In 2019, Oracle partnered with location data provider Bluedot (among many such partners) claim that the data would improve twenty times to determine the location of the individual. Among other factors, Bluedot claimed that an individual visited a location and how long it took to continue. A few years earlier, Oracle he added PlaceIQ had data on its data market, which then had 475 million location points, 100 million single users and 10,000 billion daily location-enabled device movements.

Then, of course, there are sites for people to search for or “white pages,” which allows Internet users to search for data about anyone by entering their name. By collecting property records, tax records, voting records, etc., data brokers collect government and other publicly available documents and can be searched publicly, for a small fee or at no cost. While they don’t predict people’s real-time locations, they do provide fairly up-to-date information about where people live.

Perhaps even this is not surprising: the data breach following the data privacy scandal has made it clear how private companies track the daily lives of Americans. Although these companies want to normalize their surveillance, to the exact sidewalk where you are located or to the restaurant where you live, we must not forget that the data brokers who sell these location data threaten civil rights, national security and democracy.

In the area of ​​civil rights, the U.S. Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency buys data from buyers without warranty, public disclosure, or strong oversight. carry outside everything from criminal investigations to deportations. By doing so, data brokers avoid restrictions on companies to directly hand over data to law enforcement (e.g., a cellular company can sell user data to a data broker and then sell the data to the FBI). Federal government agencies that use the data can avoid a number of legal restrictions on searches and confiscations, as well as federal controls that do not apply to “open source” or “commercially obtained” data, even if the data is turned on. US individuals.