Data brokers are companies that collect and gather information about individuals from various sources, such as websites, social media, or public records. They then sell this information to other businesses or organizations, who can use it for advertising, marketing, or other purposes.
Full definition
Data brokers who may not be traditional credit reporting agencies may fall under this regulatory area.
For the first time, a
major data broker gave consumers the tools to see the data it had collected on them, to change or update it or to have it removed.
What most consumers don't know is that
data brokers offer companies scores for other purposes unrelated to credit — for example, for marketing, advertising, identity verification, and fraud prevention.
The report contained important recommendations
regarding data brokers and give them greater control over the collection and use of their personal data.
How does the presence of ad trackers that push information about student use to
data brokers improve student learning?
The company told me it doesn't have my contact information, but that it may have used an
outside data broker to target me.
Outside experts believe they could have been identity thieves, scam artists or
shady data brokers assembling marketing profiles.
Besides data brokers, which will lose a source of revenue, advertisers who don't already have a lot of insights on their own customers might suffer in the short term.
This can range from individuals commonly known as «private investigators,» to companies that do nothing but employment screening, and to
online data brokers.
Last week, the company updated its privacy controls for users and ended its third - party «Partner Categories» program that allows advertisers to target ads based on purchasing behavior, demographics and other data sourced
from data brokers such as Axciom and Epsilon.
On the ad side of its business, Facebook has blocked third -
party data broker data from being used for ad targeting and removed audience reach estimates for Custom Audiences.
Before today, the stock had lost as much as 20 % since news of the company's practices
with data brokers like Cambridge Analytica first broke.
«We believe this step, winding down over the next six months, will help improve people's privacy on Facebook,» Graham Mudd, Facebook product marketing director, said in a statement about the change in policy
on data brokers on Wednesday.
The information includes categories like home ownership and purchase history and is collected by some of the world's largest
data brokers such as Acxiom, Epsilon and Experian.
The data used to serve the ads was gleaned from user behavior on apps and via IP addresses, information that is regularly harvested
by data brokers who repackage it to marketing firms who use it to serve ads with laser - like precision based on interest, location, age and many other markers.
Reuters had reported on Wednesday that Facebook would terminate its partnerships with several
large data brokers who help advertisers target people on the social network.
Widely available information from
commercial data brokers provided people's names, addresses, shopping habits and more, but failed to distinguish on more fine - grained matters of personality that might affect political views.
«Consumers need stronger protections for the digital age such as comprehensive data security and privacy laws, transparency and accountability
for data brokers, and rights to and control over their data,» said FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny in a statement.
Last week Facebook banned the use of third - party
data brokers like Experian and Acxiom for ad targeting, closing a marketing featured called Partner Categories.
The measures, part of which Facebook announced late Wednesday, affect a group of so -
called data brokers such as Acxiom Corp. and Oracle Corp.'s Oracle Data Cloud, formerly known as DataLogix, that gather shopping and other information on consumers that Facebook for years has incorporated into the ad - targeting system that is at the core of its business.
Widely available information from commercial
data brokers provided people's names, addresses, shopping habits and more, but failed to distinguish on more fine - grained matters of personality that might affect political views.
It brings offline and third - party data from
data brokers Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon to all categories of Facebook advertising.
That is something
data brokers do, while a screening firm has an obligation to look at each person individually.»
They soon married that data with voter lists and commercial
data broker information and discovered they had a remarkably precise portrait of a large swath of the American electorate.
In 2005, this happened on a grand scale: Ambitious identity thieves set up fake businesses specifically to obtain credit reports from consumer
data broker ChoicePoint, and ultimately gained access to up to 160,000 records.
You can opt - out of this sort of data collection at a lot of
data brokers including the companies with which Facebook has partnered.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice have both charged Jun Ying, a former CIO at
data broker Equifax, with engaging in illegal insider trading after he determined that his employer had suffered a massive breach.
Limiting its partnership with
data brokers also doesn't touch on the difficulty Facebook has had keeping your data out of the hands of other companies.
On the ad side of its business, Facebook has blocked third - party
data broker data from being used for ad targeting and removed audience reach estimates for Custom Audiences.
The second dealt with the elimination of the «Partner Categories» service, which
allows data brokers such as Acxiom to offer their customers targeting on Facebook's platform.
Ever since Facebook teamed up with a number of different
data brokers in 2013, including Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix, their targeting capabilities grew exponentially.
Phasing out of
data brokers marks a shift as Facebook faces mounting scrutiny and regulatory pressure.
Facebook announced it will be removing access to data provided by third - party
data brokers within its advertising system.
In a related bombshell, Facebook announced it was dropping Experian and TransUnion as data partners, along with seven
other data brokers including Acxiom and Cisco, as part of its effort to improve customer data privacy.
In 2005,
consumer data broker company ChoicePoint was a target of a data breach, which compromised the personal information of more than 163,000 consumers, resulting in as many as 800 identity theft cases.
Other kinds of companies may
use data brokers to compile lists for marketing purposes but law firms would be running severe risks for confidentiality breach by doing this.»
Frenkel: Are you actively looking at some of these dark
web data brokers that have been in news reports recently, that say that other independent researchers are potentially trading in this data?
The disparate viewing information is tied to IP addresses, which can be matched to characteristics like age, gender, income and more through
big data brokers like Experian without using personally identifiable information like names and addresses.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced it is shutting down its Partner Categories program, which for years allowed the company to integrate
data brokers into its targeted advertising system, combining details collected from «public records, loyalty card programs, surveys and independent data providers,» as Facebook put it on its website.
Facebook's move to restrict
how data brokers work with advertisers highlights the social network's growing dominance over its users» online lives.
These third parties are often
shadowy data brokers or advertisers most users have never even heard of.
The social network has taken one important step to increase privacy protections: it is no longer allowing advertisers to use data from third - party
data brokers when defining the target for their ads.