Chapter 13: Data Brokers Know Us Without Being Our Friends

You do not know them, but they know you — this trivial sentence, in Hitchcockian style, explains very well the concept that the then president of the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Edith Ramirez, expressed during the presentation of the report on data brokers in the US [1]. Representatives of this business community are now numerous and have collected billions of files with personal information on US and foreign citizens. Information on their purchases, their families, their income, travels, work, lifestyle, health, and much more. One of the many data brokers mentioned in the report has billions of information records in its database on online transactions made by consumers. Another, Acxiom, declared that in its data center it has information about 10% of the world’s population, just under 800 million people, with about 1,500 information records for each individual…