What Is a Data Broker?


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


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Collection of 1.4 Billion Plain-Text Leaked Passwords Found Circulating Online

    December 11, 2017

    Hackers always first go for the weakest link to quickly gain access to your online accounts. Online users habit of reusing the same password across multiple services gives hackers opportunity to use the credentials gathered from a data breach to break into their other online accounts. Researchers from security firm 4iQ have now discovered a new collective database on ...

  • Pre-Installed Keylogger Found On Over 460 HP Laptop Models

    December 8, 2017

    HP has an awful history of ‘accidentally’ leaving keyloggers onto its customers’ laptops. At least two times this year, HP laptops were caught with pre-installed keylogger or spyware applications. I was following a tweet made by a security researcher claiming to have found a built-in keylogger in several HP laptops, and now he went public with his findings. A security researcher who goes ...

  • PayPal Subsidiary Data Breach Hits Up to 1.6 Million Customers

    December 3, 2017

    Global e-commerce business PayPal has disclosed a data breach that may have compromised personally identifiable information for roughly 1.6 million customers at a payment processing company PayPal acquired earlier this year. PayPal Holdings Inc. said Friday that a review of its recently acquired company TIO Networks showed evidence of unauthorized access to the company’s network, including some confidential ...

  • Imgur—Popular Image Sharing Site Was Hacked In 2014; Passwords Compromised

    November 24, 2017

    Only after a few days of Uber admitting last year’s data breach of 57 million customers, the popular image sharing site disclosed that it had suffered a major data breach in 2014 that compromised email addresses and passwords of 1.7 million user accounts. In a blog post published on Friday, Imgur claimed that the company had been notified of ...

  • Google collects Android users’ locations even when location services are disabled

    November 21, 2017

    Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card? Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to ...

  • Bluetooth Hack Affects 20 Million Amazon Echo and Google Home Devices

    November 15, 2017

    Remember BlueBorne? A series of recently disclosed critical Bluetooth flaws that affect billions of Android, iOS, Windows and Linux devices have now been discovered in millions of AI-based voice-activated personal assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo. As estimated during the discovery of this devastating threat, several IoT and smart devices whose operating systems are often updated less frequently than smartphones and ...