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posted by martyb on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the something-for-your-blood-pressure dept.

Under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) any ordinary online Joe or Jeanette has the right to know which data are gathered about his/her activities. What's more, if a site wants to share those data with a third-party, it also has to clearly inform ya about those other companies, who in turn have to inform you about which personal data they're processing, with whom they're sharing those data and so on.

In short, turtles all the way down.

Yet that's a concept that apparently has zoomed right past the well-educated heads of such obscure companies like Oracle, Acxiom, Criteo, Equifax, Experian, Quantcast and Tapiad: just some of the data processors at the heart of the commercialized Internet.

Let's take a look at just two of them: Oracle and Acxiom.

Oracle [Data Cloud] sorts individuals into thousands of categories, based on more than 30,000 data attributes including newspaper readership, dieting, weight, ethnicity, charitable causes, online dating, politics [Pro 2nd Amendment Voters, Fiscally Conservative/Liberal, Likely Pro-Choice, Likely Supportive of Same Sex Marriage] and so on for 2 billion consumer profiles (drawn from 1,500 data partners).

Acxiom claims to cover 700 million people, with for example more than 3,500 specific behavioural insights for over 90% of UK households [Alcohol at Home, Heavy Spenders, Interest in Going to the Pub], while drumming its chest about its Personicx lifestage segmentation system and its LiveRamp IdentityLink: an identity graph which matches email and postal addresses, cookies, deviceIDs and, of course, phone numbers to individual 'consumers', merging both online and offline data.

They must be slightly envious towards Facebook's 52,000 personal attributes and 1.9 billion users.

Their curiosity piqued by such wildly optimistic messaging, the people at Privacy International decided to try out their rights under the GDPR. With some funny results: e.g. a data broker returning personal data as been provided by another data broker -- but that other data broker [Oracle] referring to an online (what else) tool only returning a blank stare. At least they made an effort, there: obtaining user consent was an interesting concept, for them data brokers do-gooders.

On November 8, Privacy International contacted data protection authorities in France, Ireland and the UK, and filed complaints against the 7 data brokers [Acxiom, Oracle], ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad) and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) mentioned.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:31AM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:31AM (#762014) Journal

    What if your local police department is accessing all of that data? Is that a "good thing" for you? (We already know that many police departments have a Facebook presence.)

    What about your local grocer? Do you want him accessing everything the data giants have amassed on you?

    Your local school board?

    Or, at the next election, do you want "the other side" broadcasting some of the more embarrassing details of your life? Or the life of your candidate?

    Can your employer access all those data?

    How about a representative of a gang?

    All of those rat bastard data brokers are selling the data for profit. Who will they sell to, and who will they not sell to? We've already seen that mega-corp (such as Apple) will cooperate with oppressive regimes to rat out dissidents (such as China). What do we think is going to happen when the oppressive regime is in Washington, or London, or Paris?

    I've downloaded the PDF in TFS. Don't have time to read it right now, but the background for the article goes into the many ways Uber has abused employees and customers. That's enough to get anyone thinking, isn't it? It may be YOU next! In fact, it probably is you. How many "discount cards" have you signed up for?

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday November 15 2018, @03:57AM (1 child)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday November 15 2018, @03:57AM (#762036) Homepage Journal

    Whenever I rant about tracking pixels, I usually include "consider the challenges faced by closeted gay right-wing politicians".

    One such, a California legislature, was stopped for a citation while driving home from a gay bar. He resigned which I regard as unfortunate: gay right wing politicians would do us all a lot of good were they open about their sexuality.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 3, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:46PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:46PM (#762172) Journal

      What do you care about a gay right-wing politician? I don't much like any of those Republicans. Oh - wait. Are there still a couple left who are NOT queer? Hmmmm - imagine that. I suppose anything is possible.

      I have heard that some of the Libertarians aren't queer. I don't know which ones, or anything. But, they probably aren't far right enough to count.

  • (Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday November 15 2018, @05:28PM (1 child)

    by quietus (6328) on Thursday November 15 2018, @05:28PM (#762252) Journal
    The Zetas did [armywarcollege.edu] by credit card and expenses data (in Mexico), to identify interesting prospects.
    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 16 2018, @04:20PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 16 2018, @04:20PM (#762728) Journal

      That PDF is surprising, actually. The massive casualties in Mexico just don't make the news. It's like the US is entirely ignorant of the bloodshed south of the border. I have been mocked right here on SN for citing stories from http://www.borderlandbeat.com/ [borderlandbeat.com] MSM won't cover it, average Joe's deny it, and government seems to have no publicly official position on it.

      People are dying by the thousands in this drug war, but it's invisible to anyone who doesn't choose to look. To see a more-or-less official publication from the War College that acknowledges all of this is surprising, almost to the point of being stunning.