Acxiom to allow consumers to view their personal secret files
For the first time ever, the big daddy of all data brokers is nearly ready to show consumers their intimate personal dossiers.
Since the company’s founding in 1969, Acxiom the data giant with profiles on 700 million individuals, has never allowed people to see their own commercial profiles extensively used by major companies for marketing. By the end of the summer, perhaps around Labor Day, the Little Rock, Arkansas-based company with more than a billion dollars in annual sales a year, will open up the vault, company officials say.
“I want to be open about what we are doing and I think there are some misperceptions about what happens and what does not happen,” said Tim Suther, who is leaving as Acxiom’s chief strategy and marketing officer at the end of this week. The more that we can talk in a straightforward manner, the more likely people are to understand it and draw their own conclusions based on the facts as opposed to supposition.”
What exactly does Acxiom know about you? Their files record where you live and who else lives there, your phone numbers, often including cell, general financial situation and interests. Your file might include race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, education, political affiliation and occupation. They might list what credit cards you use, as well as some health topics of interest to you such as diabetes or arthritis.
With limited U.S. regulation on data collection, Acxiom starts gathering information from public records. They add details people volunteer on warranty cards and surveys. Then they buy data from magazine publishers, retailers and catalog companies. They may know that you are a legal professional who received a vocational or technical education who smokes, has an interest in weight loss plans, owns a cat and enjoys lotteries. They may even know minute details such as whether your house has a gravel or shingle roof. The file does not show that you bought a specific kind of mink coat, but may indicate you have an interest in high-end fashion.
The company has information on nearly one billion online users and matches 90 percent of all U.S. social profiles, CEO Scott Howe told investors last month. “We have made significant progress establishing and collecting broader and deeper data sets than any company in the world,” he said.
Suther, who spoke on one of his last days on the job before moving on after eight years with the company, said security challenges had slowed the opening up the files. “The way the information is accessed is highly, highly secure and private. It is very, very rare that there is a public interface to this so to make this information available to any individual ultimately needs to be accompanied with a corresponding significant authentication process,” he said.
“As you can imagine, being an information company, we, like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and anybody else, we have all kinds of nefarious people and entities that are looking to try to break in, so the last thing that we want to do is to have a circumstance where information about people is inappropriately accessed.”
In the past Acxiom has allowed consumers to see the part of their dossier gathered from public documents, but the request process is onerous. Anyone interested has to send in their Social Security number, date of birth, driver’s license number, current address, phone number and email address, as well as a $5 check. Few have cleared this hurdle. Between 2009 and mid 2012 when they sent information about this process to a Congressional panel, between 77 and 342 people had asked to see their files every year, with just two to 16 annually providing enough information to get access to their file.
Suther said Acxiom did not intend to charge to see the consumer file, although the exact process was still being worked out. “The amount of data and types of data that are coming to Acxiom are changing all the time. So the complete file is like an anomaly. It will never be complete because it’s always changing,” he said. “The initial release will have a pretty healthy amount of information and we intend to iterate based on top of that.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/06/25/finally-youll-get-to-see-the-secret-consumer-dossier-they-have-on-you/
FTC commissioner wants companies to reveal what user data they collect:
It's difficult to tell just how much personal information companies have picked up about us from our online trails, our smartphone and app activity, and our credit card purchases. Sure, certain sites and apps offer ways for users to see their activity data on their platforms, but going to each one individually is not convenient, to say the least. Plus, there are many companies — so called "data brokers" — that specialize in collecting and piecing together personal data about people in the background, without broadly disclosing that fact. Now one US government official is proposing a sweeping new initiative that would let people see all the data that such companies have collected about them. Called "Reclaim Your Name," the effort is still just a proposal for now, but it will become reality in the coming months if its creator, Julie Brill, a commissioner with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has her way.
In her keynote address today at the Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference in Washington, DC, Brill cited some examples of the kind of broad data collection that many companies engage in without explicitly informing consumers, including a notorious incident in which the retail chain Target accidentally revealed a teen girl's pregnancy to her parents by crawling purchase data. As Brill put it in her speech: "Imagine walking into Target and reading a sign on the wall or a disclosure on a receipt that says: 'We will analyze your purchases to predict what health conditions you have so that we can provide you with discounts and coupons you may want.' That clear statement would surprise – and alarm – most of us."
Brill's proposed solution to this seemingly alarming collection of personal data without consumers' explicit awareness or consent is a proposed initiative she calls "Reclaim Your Name." Here's how she described it in her speech:
Reclaim Your Name would empower the consumer to find out how brokers are collecting and using data; give her access to information that data brokers have amassed about her; allow her to opt-out if she learns a data broker is selling her information for marketing purposes; and provide her the opportunity to correct errors in information used for substantive decisions – like credit, insurance, employment, and other benefits.
Brill, who has challenged companies on consumer privacy before, said she discussed the prospect with others in industry, and that "they have expressed some interest," but that she hoped the entire industry would sign on. The FTC has previously taken a hard line on data brokers, so there's a good chance this plan will come into effect in some form. Still, the fine details of how such a system would work in practice — would consumers visit the FTC website? Individual websites? What format would their data be available in? Would the program be mandated or voluntary? — have yet to be determined. Brill said that she would be working with the industry over the coming months to refine the proposal. She will also need to convince the other four FTC commissioners, including newcomer Terrell McSweeny, to get on board with her plan as well. Going off the broad outlines Brill provided, the proposal is a reassuring one for the direction of the FTC, which has been criticized in the past for not taking a harder stance on companies when it comes to consumer privacy. http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/26/4467298/reclaim-your-name-ftc-commissioner-wants-companies-to-reveal-what