A data broker (also known as an information product company) is an organization that makes money by collecting your personal information, analyzing it, and licensing it out to be used by other companies for things like marketing purposes.
Data providers gather data from many different sources to create a profile of who you are. This profile includes things like your interests, hobbies, demographics, and even the products you use. Generally, data broker companies only deal with customers to collect information. A few of the top data brokerage companies are Epsilon, Acxiom, and Experian, but there are many data brokerages worldwide that make a hefty profit from aggregating and distributing consumers’ personal data.
Read more…
Source: McAfee
Related:
- Intrusion at US healthcare software provider puts 3.8M people’s data at risk
August 7, 2026
A US healthcare software provider has admitted that hackers may have made off with sensitive data belonging to 3.8 million people, making it the largest healthcare breach reported to regulators so far this year. The attack dates to last October, when Ohio-based medical software maker Unlimited Technology Systems (UTS) detected someone poking around its commercial datacenter. ...
- Swiss government says SharePoint-linked data breach affected hundreds of accounts
August 7, 2026
Cybercriminals broke into the IT network of the Swiss government and stole data from roughly 200 accounts. As a result, the Swiss government disconnected some of its servers from the wider internet and launched an investigation. In an announcement, the Swiss government said that on July 28 2026 its security specialists noticed “abnormalities” in the Federal ...
- Apple’s Private Relay tool can leak users’ IP addresses
August 6, 2026
WebKit, Apple’s engine that powers all web browsers in its ecosystem, contained multiple flaws that helped leak the IP addresses of users who paid to keep them hidden. This is according to security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk who noted they had found “three WebKit features that bypass the proxy configuration and send traffic directly from the ...
- Over 100,000 UK Police and staff have personal data leaked in attack on national database
August 4, 2026
The UK’s Police National Legal Database (PNLD) suffered a cyberattack recently, in which it allegedly lost sensitive data on more than 100,000 criminal justice professionals. In a short press release, PNLD confirmed the breach, saying it happened over a weekend. The threat actors, which were not named in the announcement, were said to have taken names, organizations, and ...
- OpenAI explains how its AI agent breached Hugging Face
July 29, 2026
On July 28, OpenAI published an update on the agent that escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. In the update, OpenAI reiterates that the “rogue” system was a more capable, pre‑release research model, not something intended for public deployment, and that it has now been deactivated and locked down for restricted research ...
- Vatican’s official prayer app leaks more than 700K users’ info
July 24, 2026
Click To Pray, a prayer app endorsed by the Pope with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has leaked people’s names and email addresses for months – or longer – according to an ethical hacker who said she found and reported the security vulnerability six months ago to no avail. This app needs to take ...