Winehole23
08-28-2013, 10:59 AM
By Sandra Fulton (https://www.aclu.org/blog/author/sandra-fulton), ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:11pm
This month, a strongly worded Washington Post op-ed (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/demanding-transparency-from-data-brokers/2013/08/15/00609680-0382-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html) by Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill calling for transparency in the business practices of the online data broker industry provoked a heated response. While the ACLU and other privacy advocates have long had their suspicions about how and why data brokers were tracking individuals, as the commissioner stated in her op-ed:
It took the NSA revelations to make concrete what this exchange means: that firms, governments or individuals, without our knowledge or consent, can amass large amounts of private information about people to use for purposes we don’t expect or understand.
Clearly displeased with the link to the NSA scandal, Linda Woolley—CEO and president of the Direct Marketing Association—fired back with an open letter (http://blog.thedma.org/2013/08/19/dma-responds-to-op-ed-attacking-commercial-data-use/) to the commissioner. In the letter Woolley attacks the commissioner, claiming she disregards the benefits of data collection and unfairly demonizes the entire industry. But the commissioner is right to focus on the data broker industry’s troubling practices.
Interestingly, that massive, secret databases of individuals are being created and sold is not the issue under debate. That’s a simple and open matter of fact. For example:
One aggregator, PeekYou (http://www.peekyou.biz/), boasts, “Our patented technology analyzes content from over sixty social sites, news sources, homepages and blog platforms and identifies the actual people behind it, combining their scattered digital footprints into a comprehensive record of their online identity.”
RapLeaf advertises (http://www.rapleaf.com/) as having “Real-Time Data on 80% of U.S. Emails.”
Brill points (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/demanding-transparency-from-data-brokers/2013/08/15/00609680-0382-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html) out that one of the largest such aggregators, Acxiom, reportedly has information on about 700 million active consumers worldwide, with some 1,500 data points per person.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/not-just-nsa-data-brokers-amass-detailed-profiles-everyone-online
This month, a strongly worded Washington Post op-ed (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/demanding-transparency-from-data-brokers/2013/08/15/00609680-0382-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html) by Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill calling for transparency in the business practices of the online data broker industry provoked a heated response. While the ACLU and other privacy advocates have long had their suspicions about how and why data brokers were tracking individuals, as the commissioner stated in her op-ed:
It took the NSA revelations to make concrete what this exchange means: that firms, governments or individuals, without our knowledge or consent, can amass large amounts of private information about people to use for purposes we don’t expect or understand.
Clearly displeased with the link to the NSA scandal, Linda Woolley—CEO and president of the Direct Marketing Association—fired back with an open letter (http://blog.thedma.org/2013/08/19/dma-responds-to-op-ed-attacking-commercial-data-use/) to the commissioner. In the letter Woolley attacks the commissioner, claiming she disregards the benefits of data collection and unfairly demonizes the entire industry. But the commissioner is right to focus on the data broker industry’s troubling practices.
Interestingly, that massive, secret databases of individuals are being created and sold is not the issue under debate. That’s a simple and open matter of fact. For example:
One aggregator, PeekYou (http://www.peekyou.biz/), boasts, “Our patented technology analyzes content from over sixty social sites, news sources, homepages and blog platforms and identifies the actual people behind it, combining their scattered digital footprints into a comprehensive record of their online identity.”
RapLeaf advertises (http://www.rapleaf.com/) as having “Real-Time Data on 80% of U.S. Emails.”
Brill points (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/demanding-transparency-from-data-brokers/2013/08/15/00609680-0382-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html) out that one of the largest such aggregators, Acxiom, reportedly has information on about 700 million active consumers worldwide, with some 1,500 data points per person.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/not-just-nsa-data-brokers-amass-detailed-profiles-everyone-online