In this day and age, information is king. So who has yours?

Photo Credit: ✖ Daniel Rehn cc
Photo Credit: ✖ Daniel Rehn cc

Last week a federal appeals court brought a judgement against NSA’s surveillance program, which if it sticks could be a big (albeit limited) win for privacy advocates. But the truth is that the NSA is far from the only one out there with your digital footprint in a file. And while neither is necessarily more insidiously collecting data than the other, if some are to be believed private agencies may have ten times the amount of data collected on you.

Often times these companies prefer to keep their main services hidden, and avoid their more colloquial and sinister label: data brokers. And according to Fred Abrams of Asset Search Blog, they walk loud and carry a big stick:

Pages 22, 24, 34 & Appendix B-5 of a May 2014 FTC report similarly indicate that data brokers can search for your financial information including: where and when you open a bank account; estimated household income; the assets you own; loan history; credit card use and tax return transcripts.

…The 60 Minutes episode explains your computer’s browsers and your mobile devices permit businesses like data brokers to follow your click stream.  Stated differently, private sector businesses are able to employ browsers and mobile devices to mine data and harvest your personal information.

According to the 60 Minutes episode, the end result is that people “are making dossiers…about individuals” and “[t]he largest data broker is Acxiom, a marketing giant that brags it has, on average, 1,500 pieces of information on more than 200 million Americans.

That amount of data collection may seem absurd, but it’s actually worth something to the data brokers that process it. By tracking your habits and preferences across apps, sites, social media, and even grocery store loyalty cards, data brokers are determining the context for that final “purchase” click; something more valuable to advertisers than just the sale.

So just how much is all that data worth? In 2013, a single data broker Acxiom reported about $1.1 billion in revenue for that year alone.

While some of your information, medical files for instance, are protected by federal law, health insurance companies buy up information on consumer purchases to flag health-related conditions. Some reports say that if the U.S. healthcare system were to use big data “creatively and effectively,” they could create more than $300 billion in value every year.

That data is so valuable, it’s become a player in the RadioShack bankruptcy case, where—though it was initially withdrawn from auction—the personally identifiable information from more than 70 million customers has just been added to a new auction.

That list of RadioShack’s customer information could be of real value to a data broker, but they’re no longer the only ones that operate in big data. In what may or may not be a surprise, Facebook is now one of the premiere monetizers of data aggregation, even teaming up with the four biggest data broker agencies, as a further way to mine their customers for what they can. Which makes sense, given the exclusive access it has to over one billion people’s data. And as Sherbit Blog notes, they’ve leveraged that power to become a massive advertising business, both online and off:

Last month, researchers with the Belgian Privacy Commission conducted a comprehensive analysis of Facebook’s new Data Use Policy and Terms of Service and concluded that the company is in violation of European law: it has authorized itself to continuously collect users’ location information, sell users’ photos for advertising purposes, and track both users’ and non-users’ browsing habits across the internet—while failing to educate users on the true extent of this ‘tracking,’ and making it prohibitively difficult for them to ‘opt-out.’ The researchers detailed many troubling aspects of Facebook’s data collection practices, including evidence that one of Facebook’s cookies is stored in every browser that visits a site with a ‘Social Plugin‘ (the embedded ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons), regardless of whether or not they are a Facebook user.

…In the past few years, Facebook has made some major moves in the web advertising business. In 2013, Facebook purchased Atlas, a huge internet ad server (previously owned by Microsoft) responsible for hosting somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of all internet ads. Atlas is second only to Google’s DoubleClick, and the acquisition made Facebook the second biggest web advertiser in the world. After the deal, Mark Zuckerberg boasted: “We believe the Atlas platform will help us demonstrate even more clearly the connection between ad impressions and purchases. We could help marketers measure the effectiveness of their ad impressions better not just on Facebook, but across the entire internet.” The Atlas acquisition gives Facebook a huge slice of the web advertising pie. Facebook can use Atlas to correlate purchases with browsing behavior on other (non-Facebook) sites—then, advertisers who are already working with Facebook can pay a small premium to get a more holistic view of their marketing campaigns’ effectiveness across the internet. The goal is to develop an effective “monetization engine” for the social network: a smooth track between monitoring browsing behavior, delivering pertinent advertisements, and securing purchases.

Though the EFF has some guidance on how users can opt out of these tracking methods, it’s still a laborious process, and one that might not even work very well. The sad truth of these things is that though you are a hot commodity, data brokers know a whole lot more about you than you know about them. Congress and the FTC have been working towards stepping up scrutiny of these data brokers, but for now there’s very little by means of transparency for consumers to rely on. What data is collected on you and where it’s going is almost unknowable. But if the internet has taught us anything, it’s, unfortunately, probably everything and everywhere.