"What Surveillance Valley knows about you" (GOOG)
From Pando Daily:
“In 2012, the data broker industry generated 150
billion in revenue that’s twice the size of the entire intelligence
budget of the United States government—all generated by the effort to
detail and sell information about our private lives.”
— Senator Jay Rockefeller IV
“Quite simply, in the digital age, data-driven marketing has become the fuel on which America’s free market engine runs.”
— Direct Marketing Association
Google is very secretive about the exact nature of its for-profit
intel operation and how it uses the petabytes of data it collects on us
every single day for financial gain. Fortunately, though, we can get a
sense of the kind of info that Google and other Surveillance Valley
megacorps compile on us, and the ways in which that intel might be used
and abused, by looking at the business practices of the “data broker”
industry.
Thanks to a series of Senate hearings, the business of data brokerage
is finally being understood by consumers, but the industry got its
start back in the 1970s as a direct outgrowth of the failure of
telemarketing. In its early days, telemarketing had an abysmal success
rate: only 2 percent of people contacted would become customers. In his
book, “The Digital Perso,” Daniel J. Solove explains what happened next:
To increase the low response rate, marketers sought to
sharpen their targeting techniques, which required more consumer
research and an effective way to collect, store, and analyze information
about consumers. The advent of the computer database gave marketers
this long sought-after ability — and it launched a revolution in
targeting technology.
Data brokers rushed in to fill the void. These operations pulled in
information from any source they could get their hands on — voter
registration, credit card transactions, product warranty information,
donations to political campaigns and non-profits, court records —
storing it in master databases and then analyzing it in all sorts of
ways that could be useful to direct-mailing and telemarketing outfits.
It wasn’t long before data brokers realized that this information could
be used beyond telemarketing, and quickly evolved into a global
for-profit intelligence business that serves every conceivable data and
intelligence need.
Today, the industry churns somewhere around $200 billion in revenue
annually. There are up to 4,000 data broker companies — some of the
biggest are publicly traded — and together, they have detailed
information on just about every adult in the western world.
No source of information is sacred: transaction records are bought in
bulk from stores, retailers and merchants; magazine subscriptions are
recorded; food and restaurant preferences are noted; public records and
social networks are scoured and scraped. What kind of prescription drugs
did you buy? What kind of books are you interested in? Are you a
registered voter? To what non-profits do you donate? What movies do you
watch? Political documentaries? Hunting reality TV shows?...MUCH MORE
