CalMatters: Who’s buying your personal data: Disney, GM, your insurer and bank. Here’s what they get

“To build their databases, data brokers broadly rely on three types of data, according to Justin Sherman, a scholar-in-residence at the Electronic Privacy Information Center who formerly ran a research program on data brokers at Duke University.”

“Inferences are the ways a data point might lead a broker to determine something else about a person, Sherman points out.”

“‘From that I can derive all kinds of information about other characteristics: finance, health, demographics, religion,’ Sherman said.”

“‘The data broker industry is way underregulated,’ Sherman said.”

“But as Sherman points out, few people have ever heard of these companies, or could remember agreeing to having their data sold.”

“‘The notion that a data broker gets consent to sell someone’s data to clients flies in the face of years of academic peer-reviewed research, polling, news reporting, and people’s personal experiences,’ Sherman said. ‘People are not actually consenting to this, so that notion is fanciful.'”

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