Privacy Post: May 3rd

Gm privacy pioneers 👋

This is issue #3 of Privacy Post - the not-so-private privacy newsletter, where I share privacy news, knowledge, and technology happenings to keep you: professionals, amateurs, enthusiasts, and anyone looking to learn more, informed on the ever-changing privacy landscape.

🔥 Today’s post includes:

• Knowledge topic 🧠 - Is your grandma a data broker?

• In the news 🗞 - A lot of AI topics, no surprise here

• Meme Post 🤣

🧠 Is your grandma a data broker?

Data brokers are like gossiping elderly women — they are always listening and tend to invade your privacy.

However, my grandma does it out of love and I genuinely enjoy sharing information, and sadly, I cannot say the same for data brokers.

As a consumer, what should you know about data brokers and their privacy concerns?👇

A data broker is a business that collects, cleans, and processes personal information about consumers and sells that information to other organizations.

LET'S BREAK DOWN WHAT THIS MEANS.

A broker may collect your purchasing habits from a retailer. Then, they might gather your religion and smoking habits from a dating app.

Independent of one another, this data may be useless, but together, paired with other pieces of information about you from other sources, these pieces of data enable brokers to create a profile of who you are.

Typically, brokers create profiles of individuals for marketing purposes and sell them to businesses that want to target their advertisements and special offers.

Yes, it sounds shifty to me as well.

WHERE DO THEY GET ALL THIS DATA?

Their sources are public and non-public. Including, but not limited to:

📄 Public records: birth certificates, marriage licenses, divorce records, voter registration information, court records, bankruptcy records, motor vehicle records, and census data

🍪 Third-party companies: This is often in the form of website cookies. When you go to a website and consent to sharing your data, chances are your data could end up being sold to a data broker

💻 Web browsing history: Every time you use a search engine or an app, take a quiz to see what Harry Potter house you belong to, enter a sweepstake, or just visit websites, you are leaving an electronic trail of activity

💸 Other companies: They could buy your information from credit card companies (purchase history), apps on your phone, social networking sites, retailers, and more

PRIVACY CONCERNS?

You betcha! I have 3 of them:

1) Even though brokers claim the data they have is anonymized (unable to identify individuals), researchers found it's quite simple to de-anonymize it.

2) Privacy laws are lagging behind, failing to regulate data brokers effectively and prioritize users' needs over business interests.

3) Think about all the times you’ve hastily selected “accept” to privacy and cookie policies without reading them. I often do. By clicking accept, we hand over the rights of our data to the website or app’s choosing, which could be to sell to data brokers.

While this is legal, with the number of websites and apps people visit on a daily basis I personally think it’s unrealistic for anyone to read every company's cookie policy and make a judgment whether they accept or decline. It’s not practical.

CONCLUSION

Writing this got me thinking about the purpose of data brokers. They are hoarders and analyzers of data, but why? Greed? Money? Power? To provide me with ads for things I never knew existed and could probably live a happy life without? Suspicious…

Additionally, everything I’ve read so far speaks very badly of data brokers. How have they been able to fly under the radar for so long? If anyone has a reason why data brokers aren’t the gum stuck to the bottom of our shoes, please enlighten me.

Next week, I plan to dive deeper into this topic. The more I read the more questions I have and the more I want to write about this ominous and opaque topic.

🗞 In the news

• California proposes an AI bill - With no national AI law on deck, this is the closest the US has to potential AI legislation

• Snapchat releases an AI chatbox feature, My AI, and there are privacy concerns

• Maine introduces a biometric privacy law. The first was in Illinois.

🤣 Meme Post

Thanks for reading! See you next week. If you want more, be sure to follow me on LinkedIn (@annapeterson).

😄 This newsletter is a place for all to learn about data privacy, question the technology we use, and understand how it fits into the world we live in.

Disclaimer: The ideas of Privacy Post are my own and not my employer's.