Battling Data Brokers: Reputation.com Builds Data Privacy Vault
By Karla Robinson
December 11, 2012
December 11, 2012
- “‘Information resellers,’ also known as ‘data brokers,’ have collected hundreds to thousands of details — what we buy, our race or ethnicity, our finances and health concerns, our Web activities and social networks — on almost every American adult,” reports The New York Times, highlighting one startup, Reputation.com, that wants to help Internet users escape the surveillance economy.
- In addition to data brokers, there are companies that rank consumers using computer algorithms “to covertly score Internet users, identifying some as ‘high-value’ consumers… while dismissing others as a waste of time and marketing money. Yet another type of company, called an ad-trading platform, profiles Internet users and auctions off online access to them to marketers in a practice called ‘real-time bidding.'”
- These new methods have spurred investigations from Congress and federal agencies, but they are legal — for now.
- “As the popular conversation shifts from practices like privacy policies and opt-outs to ideas like consumer empowerment and data rights, however, marketing industry efforts have not kept pace with changing public attitudes, analysts say.”
- “Consumers are leaving an exponentially growing digital footprint across channels and media, and they are awakening to the fact that marketers use this data for financial gain,” says Fatemeh Khatibloo, a Forrester analyst, who adds, “individuals increasingly want to know when data about them is being collected, what is being stored and by whom, and how that data is being used.”
- Reputation.com thinks it has the solution. “For $99 per year, clients can have the company remove their personal details from databases maintained by various information resellers. They can also install company software that blocks Web tracking by 200 data brokers, advertising networks and ad trading platforms.”
- The company’s data privacy vault, scheduled to open early next year, is designed to help consumers with their personal identity management. The data vault will serve as an authorization supervisor that manages the permissions marketers would need to access information about individuals.
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