The Dark Market for Personal Data
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It kills me that this is a $156B/yr industry, yet asymptotically zero of the money paid for various lists are going to the actual individuals whose information is being bought, whether mundane emails or more detailed profile attributes.
The adage "if I had a penny for every time ..." would seem to align various parties' incentives. Perhaps somebody should release a product based on the underlying premise that some emails tied to some shadow of your identity will inevitably be sold, so might as well set a floor price of "a couple of cents" as per the article and watch in bittersweet resignation as the pennies flow in.
1. As a commodity becomes scarcer it's price tends to go in which direction?
a. up
b. down
As this is an open internet test you may wish to refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand for the answer.
The author argues for his second reason that data brokers should be regulated because "many of the lists have no business being in the hands of retailers, bosses or banks," yet he fails to make any logical connection between the reason he gives and the regulations he wants. Ignoring for a moment the complete absence of evidence or facts to support his claim, his argument fails the most basic scrutiny -- his reason has nothing to do with regulating data brokers.
The segue from personality tests -- an odd digression, to say the least -- into hand wringing over the possibility of employers secretly using lists based on health conditions is just absurd. Enacting regulations to address a problem we have literally never seen happen is the essence of bureaucratic incompetence.
It only becomes truly spectacular when you consider that regulating the company that sells the data does nothing to prevent employers from doing it anyway.
[0] https://www.privacyrights.org/how-private-my-credit-report
Broadly speaking they had three types of data (which happened to correlate chronologically as they looked around for ways to generate revenue). I recognise that the first two aren't really what this article is about.
First, data contributed directly by users (through personality quizzes, typically)
Second, performing lookalikes based on web accesses to sites they were able to track (beacons were installed on a surprising number of large, popular sites).
Third, linking these data with some private credit bureaus' records - the link was in two directions.
It meant they could do very targeted advertising - putting car adverts in the browser of someone who'd written off their car (which could be determined by them having just filed a insurance claim).
The other direction was fascinating - subjecting credit seekers to quizzes in order to contribute to the determination (still made by the credit offerer, natch) of whether the would-be customer was a good or bad risk.
Very early on there had been talk of being a portal for users to opt in or out of being tracked and analysed in these ways, offering this as a free service to users, while on the flip-side offering people actual money for opting in. This area was explored in some detail, including building a web service to demonstrate to people how much they were worth to advertisers based on (you guessed it, a quiz) whether they were in the market for a car/house/insurance, where they holidays, etc.
:-)