Most of us interact daily with online retailers, social platforms, and financial services but do we actually know how much data these companies collect from us behind the scenes? If we pull back the veil and see what data these companies are actually collecting about us and the data brokers and massive data aggregators that they sell that data to, we can often find more than we bargained for.
Many of these companies don’t just track clicks or purchases, they infer information about us. Information like income, lifestyle, interests, household composition, and even personality traits from the data they receive.
For example, we can request our information from massive data aggregators like Socure, Acxiom, and Epsilon that have turn-around time anywhere from a week to a month. Once these files arrive, they often contain hundreds of even thousands of data points, even detailed inferences about how we live, what we value, and how much we can afford which reveals comprehensively these massive data aggregators can categorize us often packaging our online behaviors into profiles or risk scores then used elsewhere.
Of course, this is used for online advertising, but it can also impact our credit decisions, job screenings, and long-term digital reputations. But, if you want to opt-out? Goodluck. They don’t make it easy.
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