Should the u.s. federal government regulate private data brokers
Answers
Last week, a man in a Chicago suburb received a letter from OfficeMax. It was addressed to Mike Seay; the line below his name read “Daughter Killed in Car Crash.” OfficeMax blamed an unnamed third-party data broker for mistakenly printing the information on the envelope. A distraught Seay responded with some important questions: “Why would they have that type of information? Why would they need that?”
The answer is that for data brokers, any piece of personal information is potentially valuable. Relevance is only an algorithm — or a sales pitch — away. Data brokers are supposed to be the unseen cogs in the surveillance economy, collecting vast amounts of information on hundreds of millions of people and analyzing it for patterns and likely outcomes. They are devoted to extracting value from the raw information of our lives for their own gain; they sell this information to stores, insurers, banks, tech companies, HR departments and basically anyone who comes calling. Government agencies are part of the trade as well, with the DMV selling to data brokers and the TSA passing on information to debt collectors.