Abstract
Data brokers are agents that gather individuals’ information from a variety of online and offline sources, such as mail, e-mail, social media posts, personal websites, vehicle records, US census records, retailers’ system entries, and real estate history records. Data brokers often collect these data without the permission or awareness of the involved individuals. Data are combined and synthesized using sophisticated analytic tools and then offered through data services for sale or rent to other data brokers, businesses, or individuals for different purposes. This entry provides an overview of data brokers, including what data they collect, the sources and methods they use, the benefits and risks for individuals involved in data collection, and the choices for individuals to opt out the data collection.
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Further Readings
Anthes, G. (2015, January 1). Data brokers are watching you. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2688498.2686740
CIPPIC. (2006). On the data trail: How detailed information about you gets into the hands of organizations with whom you have no relationship. A report on the Canadian data brokerage industry. Retrieved from https://idtrail.org/files/DatabrokerReport.pdf
Kitchin, R. (2014). The data revolution: Big data, open data, data infrastructures and their consequences. In R. Kitchin (Ed.), Small data, data infrastructures and data brokers (Rev. ed., pp. 27–47). London: Sage.
Kitchin, R., & Lauriault, T. (2014, January 8). Small data, data infrastructures and big data by Rob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault: SSRN. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376148
Ramirez, E., Brill, J., Ohlhausen, M., Wright, J., & McSweeny, T. (2014). Data brokers a call for transparency and accountability. Retrieved from https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/data-brokers-call-transparency-accountability-report-federal-trade-commission-may-2014/140527databrokerreport.pdf
Singer, N. (2012, June 17). Mapping, and sharing, the consumer genome. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-ofconsumer-database-marketing.htm
Venkatadri, G., Andreou, A., Liu, Y., Mislove, A., Gummadi, K., Loiseau, P., … Goga, O. (2018, May 1). Privacy risks with Facebook’s PII-based targeting: Auditing a data broker’s advertising interface. In IEEE conference publication. Retrieved February 27, 2019, from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8418598
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Alowairdhi, A., Ma, X. (2019). Data Brokers and Data Services. In: Schintler, L., McNeely, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Big Data. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_298-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_298-1
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