Your personal data that you thought was secured is most probably being traded on daily basis, without your consent. Most of us don’t know or are just starting to realize, our privacy is no longer secret anymore.
In today’s world, customer data is considered one of the most crucial components of any business, and as we approach the era of Digitalization. we understand its potential and the risk.
The immediate risk to your privacy is coming from the thousands of companies, No, not the tech giants. These are faceless companies you’ve never heard of they are called data brokers and they’re collecting analyzing and keeping our most sensitive personal data and selling it as a commodity to advertisers, individual businesses, or even to the government often without our explicit knowledge.
Basically, a data broker is a company that collects segregates, and trade data so for example if you use your smartphone to post something on social media or you use some other third-party services or you buy something using your credit card then you leave a small portion of data about yourself which includes your personal details and behavior how you behave on the internet.
This data is being collected by the data brokers which afterward creates personalize profiles of an individual and these personalized profiles are then sold to advertisers, individuals, businesses, etc which are used for advertisement or marketing, the data could be used in various ways like target based ads such as based on person activity location preference, etc personalize id of any individual help marketing agencies to target ad or to a group who share similar interest, It allows the businesses to target their right audience and in order to sell their product efficiently.
However, there are various aspects why we should bother about the data we are sharing because the data brokers are collecting billions of data billions of data points be it raw or refined everything is vital for them be it now or a few years later.
There are three major types of data brokers in the world. Search sites, marketing, advertising, and risk mitigation.
First, search sites gather your personal details to host it on their site for public view. These sites then allow people to search for your information for free or with a small subscription price are usually starting point when people are looking to use your private data in a process known as “Doxing”, since they are easy to use and accessible to anyone.
The second type of data brokers are marketing and advertising brokers that create personalized profiles on individuals which include information that will help them target their interest-based audience for marketing. (QUICK TIP: Check your Gmail spam folder and see a pile of unwanted emails from XYZ sender and avoid downloading files from unknown sender ) any, For example, there are certain entities like Data Logics, Axiom, and Experian the data with these companies is so huge one can predict your future purchase based on your interest, ordering pattern.
The last is risk mitigation brokers. let me explain Have you ever applied for a personal or home loan and you are asked to verify your address or your mother’s maiden name? They do identity verification products used to comply with regulations or to prevent fraud when customers attempt to make a transaction. There are three types of verification formats when dealing with these types of products: a numerical scoring system indicating the level of risk associated with a transaction, a quiz with questions like “which of these vehicles belong to you?”Or “what is your high school name?” and a simple match or no match verification.
Not all data broker companies are transparent about what they do? how they do how will they do it? there is a shortage of understanding and a lack of inducement for consumers to understand user agreements.
YES, this is the same page that you often skip, without reading then scrolling down to accept all terms and conditions, yeah we all do that to save time,
What they consent to when they are using so-called free services if you give away enough information about yourself about your behavior about what you like who you are basically what are your hobbies and so on and
But soon you could become prey to unwanted advertisements or political manipulation basically there is this saying Nothing comes free in this world. So if you are using something for free when you become a product of somebody. It’s always advisable to read user agreements.
It’s quite clear that the database services can deliver the best of services for end-user and sometimes we pay for those services by giving up our data we need to ensure that the data we are sharing is managed and stored in a secure way but then what about the data breach? data were stolen from tech companies often end up on the dark web for just a few dollars, we cannot control it but at least we can prevent it.
After all its a matter of our personal integrity