How safe is your personal information? An investigation by the 60 Minutes team explains what you really need to know about data brokers and how they get your information. Producer Maria Gavrilovic explains: “The majority of these companies don’t even consider themselves a data broker. They like to call themselves an app maker or a marketing company or a retailer.”
And as producer Graham Messick says, “There’s not a lot of transparency out there because there’s so much money to be made.”
So what are data brokers? They are the ones who gather and interpret details about you, based on your Internet searches, then sell it without you even knowing. 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft had this reaction: “I just didn’t know it was going on. I had no idea. When you go on a website, when you visit it, you are in effect giving them permission to take any information they want- that’s the standard for consent.”
Simply checking a news site or using a dating site can give data brokers details about you. Another problem, according to Gavrilovic: “They’re able to marry what you’re doing when you’re offline- where you’re shopping, where you’re going, what you’re buying- to the information that’s online.”
So why is this a problem? Messick explains: “Ultimately the concern is everything gets put in one pool, one identifier, and they know everything about you from minute to minute to minute to what you eat, when you go to bed, when you’re home, when you’re not home. It gets a little scary. It’s like a force multiplier effect.”
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