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Inside One of the World's Largest Data Brokers
itwbennett writes "Contrary to recent reports, data broker Acxiom is not planning to give consumers access to all the information they've collected on us. That would be too great a challenge for the giant company, says spokesperson Alexandra Levy. Privacy blogger Dan Tynan recently spoke with Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, Chief Privacy Officer at Acxiom (she claims to be the very first CPO) about how the company collects information and what they do with it. This should give you some small measure of comfort: 'We don't know that you bought a blue shirt from Lands End. We just know the kinds of products you are interested in. We're trying to get a reasonably complete picture of your household and what the individuals who live there like to do,' says Glasgow."
Stephanie Perrin was Chief Privacy Officer at Zero-Knowledge Systems (now known as RadialPoint) back in 2001.
Contrary to recent reports, data broker Acxiom is not planning to give consumers access to all the information they've collected on us.
Naturally.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Have they no decency? Sounds like a bunch of sicko and perverts!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I want to be able to opt out
"No need to worry, we have slightly less specific information than people think."
They know everything. Not just the shirt, but how you paid, the brand, how much it was, its size and all the alternatives that were available at the time in the store.
I worked in a project with them for years and I can tell you they have every last scintilla of every purchase you have EVER made with an EFTPOS or credit card.
They, like Kang, Know All.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
We're trying to get a reasonably complete picture of your household and what the individuals who live there like to do
I like to have my privacy respected. I've willingly shared this information with Acxiom, but apparently my primary interest isn't valuable for Acxiom to understand. Companies like Acxiom deserve to have their corporate systems pillaged and this data handed out willy nilly to whomever the pillagers associate with .. without recrimination. Because this is PRECISELY how Acxiom operates.
If our political systems weren't so ridiculously corrupt, Acxiom's board and upper management would have been against the wall long ago. It's about time that companies like Acxiom were targetted by righteous hackers and their corrupt business practices exposed for the entire world to see.
They know the location you were at, who purchased at around the same time and correlates to you, if you have a loyalty card, the data for that is sold on bulk, and includes stuff like email address and telephone.
In the case of data services like Choicepoint, they analyze for political affiliations and likely voting choices and participate in a lot of voter-blocking measures designed to sway elections. e.g. Florida's 'voter scrubbing', Mexico's voter challenges etc.
The idea that you're entitled to privacy has been sold to the highest bidder, and the political machine seems so corrupt you can never get it back.
"if a representative of a firm tells you they are not doing something which would enhance their business model, they are mistaken, liar, or are only in the process of implementing in the short future".
In the case which interest us, of course knowing that kind of minutiae detail would be interesting, and of course they are either lying when they say they don't gather it, OR the PR does not know and is an incapable, or they are implementing a way to sell it to corporation. In their case they are almost certainly lying, as most firm of such nature I know in the US don#t save such data. They all do.
You are required, by law, to allow access to the data held on an individual in order to check for accuracy and relevance to purpose. If you don't do that, you're in breach of the Data Protection Act.
Give me access to my data.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
FTA: "Acxiom data can’t be used for employment background checks, credit verification, or insurance underwriting, she adds, because that would make it a consumer reporting company under Fair Credit Report Act. Companies regulated under the FCRA can’t use that data for marketing purposes."
Urm, "Chinese walls", anyone? Want to bet that they don't sell that information to other people for doing exactly that?
If you cannot tell people exactly what data you have collected about them, you are not allowed to collect that data. Penalties up to 2 years imprisonment apply. (Well, it is Europe, so I doubt anybody has been sent to prison yet for breach of data privacy laws, but still....) And they would also have to delete any and all data on request from the people that data is about. Cannot do it? Sorry, your business Model is criminal.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Send a cheque or postal order with the order or in settlement of the account.
The last time I checked, eBay specifically forbade using a cheque or postal order to pay for an item that a buyer has bought. Which existing major online stores do allow using a cheque or postal order?
We're trying to get a reasonably complete picture of your household and what the individuals who live there like to do
My name is Anonymous Coward. We here in the Coward family like to live our lives knowing companies like yours do not have any information about us other than, of course, the fact that we don't like companies like yours do not have any information about us.
Now that you know this, please update your database accordingly.
So parasites like Acxiom cannot profit from
invading my personal privacy.
At a minimum, all users can and should delete both "normal"
cookies and Flash cookies.
Screw these people who pry into the lives of others ( Das Leben
des Anderen, sound familiar ? ). They deserve nothing but derision.
What if you get a UK dual citizenship, can you apply the Data Protection Act VS the US company while being in the US?
I interned at Acxiom during my senior year of undergrad so I thought I'd give another view and share a funny story.
If I remember correctly, their revenue is broken down roughly like the following:
60% - data analysis of 3rd party data, even big name tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc) will send them data to analyze because its cheaper and/or easier
30% - data storage, they store 3rd party data on tape in a fire and water safe bunkers (no joke)
10% - random crap
These are the guys responsible not for sending you junk snail mail, but figuring out which junk snail mail to send to you and to make sure you don't get duplicates too often. They are also responsible for scraping yellow and white pages for information. In fact, I know the guy they paid bookoodles of money to develop the white page scraping algorithm. Previously they were shipping off yellow and white pages to 3rd world Asian countries so they could be manually entered.
I'm sure some of the people working there are quite skilled (such as my white page friend); however, the majority of their developers seem to be completely incompetent. Their internal structure is extremely convoluted with little inter-team cooperation or [good] management oversight. Additionally, they lack a set of developer standards requiring PQA, QA, version control, unit testing, etc.
Both of these factors coupled with a company that's willing to hire mediocre developers leads to the following:
Compiled code is running on one or more severs and absolutely no one has any clue what it does - the guy that wrote it doesn't work here anymore. We can't stop it from running, however, since it might be used by one or more of our customers
No one knows were the source code lives. If that code ever needs to be updated then we're just going to have to rewrite it
That source code is versioned, if the source is accidentally deleted then we're just going to have to rewrite it
No's sure which of our servers are owned by us or one of the other billion teams
No one can read this code because it's a hacked together perl script that someone specifically wrote in an obfuscated manner to ensure job security (I'm not joking).
Additionally, you’d sometimes find code written in an a language that no one there knew how to use because it was written 25 years go. OH! PASCAL!
My intern project while I was there was more or less an automated system to clean up after other developers. Every night it would do the following:
1. Search several servers and compile a list of "useful" files. Determining "useful" is both "interesting" and necessary. Their servers had gigs of useless input and output files, but no one would clean them up for fear of breaking something. The strategy for my program was to ignore them, but not delete them.
2. Some of their severs’ files could be accessed through file shares, but the majority had to be SSH’d into. The servers had no consistent security setup so adding in the capability for my program to successfully communicate with all of them in an extensible, secure way that could be encapsulated with a single simple interface was a joy.
3. Once we had a list of files, my program would try to weed out duplicates across servers and folders (mkfile is a fun one) and try to match up executables to source code (again, mkfile is a fun one)
4. Once we'd played match maker, it would try to automatically version all of the files in a semi-sane manner. The SVN server had an absolutely bonkers structure that was rivaled by only the chaos of their internal structure.
5. Once finished, it would generate a basic styled HTML page giving a report of what it had done, it's success rate, and some metrics about what kind of files were out there in the wild wes
I wonder if Ariel Castro could have been found by mining this data? Yeah, I know it sucks, but the data is already out there. Maybe it could be put to good use.
From TFA: "Author Dan Tynan has been writing about Internet privacy for the last 3,247 years. He wrote a book on the topic."
Was that book written before or after the fall of Babylon?
Massively off-topic, thoroughly weird (even for /. - whatever you're taking, stop; whatever you should be taking, please resume, or some kind of thing) yet some-weirdly-how, right. That's even more weird.