Agnes Kirk
Protecting your personal data
Have you ever gotten coupons in the mail for items you just bought at a store? Or received catalogs from companies you briefly visited online? Or had online ads for certain products follow you across the internet?
These aren’t random coincidences.
Companies you’ve likely never heard of monitor your financial transactions, analyze what you do on the internet, aggregate information from online forms you’ve filled out and use all that data to create detailed profiles.
They’re called data brokers, and they sell all this information to the folks who send you those coupons, catalogs and place ads in your internet browser.
A Federal Trade Commission report on data brokers (Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability) stated marketers could use “seemingly innocuous inferences about consumers in ways that raise concerns. For example, while a data broker could infer that a consumer belongs in a data segment for ‘Biker Enthusiasts,’ which would allow a motorcycle dealership to offer the consumer coupons, an insurance company using that same segment might infer that the consumer engages in risky behavior.”
Information collected by data brokers also could “be used to facilitate harassment, or even stalking, and may expose domestic violence victims, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, public officials, or other individuals to retaliation or other harm,” according to the report.
Short of living in a bunker with no connection to the outside world, there’s no easy way to eliminate data brokers from collecting information about you. But there are steps you can take to help safeguard your privacy:
- Be careful about what you post on social media. For example, don’t discuss medical conditions because that information could potentially be shared.
- Any time you sign up for a free service or app, be aware that the price of admission is often your data. If you don’t want your information shared, consider whether you really need the app or service.
- If you want to surf the internet without being followed by data brokers, disable third-party cookies or use a browser extension that blocks tracking. Also, regularly clear your browser of cookies.
- Many data-brokers allow you to “opt-out” of their databases. You have to fill out forms at each data broker. The World Privacy Forum (worldprivacyforum.org) keeps an updated list of tips on how to opt out. Keep in mind that data brokers are constantly collecting information. So, for example, if you move, your records will reappear in databases.
You can learn more about data brokers and the types of information they collect by reading this FTC’s report.
Sincerely,
Agnes Kirk, Washington State Chief Information Security Officer
Ph: 1.888.241.7597 or cybersecurity@ocs.wa.gov
