What data brokers know about you and how you can opt-out

MassPrivateI

The Acxiom Corporation, a marketing technology company that has amassed details on the household makeup, financial means, shopping preferences and leisure pursuits of a majority of adults in the United States, knows that Mr.Scott E. Howe is 45, married with children, the owner of a house in the 2,500-square-foot range, and is interested, among other things, in tennis, domestic travel, cooking, crafts, sweepstakes and contests. Those intimate details, Mr. Howe says, are entirely accurate.   

“I am crazy about that stuff,” he says of the sweepstakes and contests.

Mr. Howe is one of the first Americans to get a detailed glimpse of his own marketing profile because he happens to be the chief executive of Acxiom. But most consumers never learn the specific pieces of information that have been compiled about them by marketers.

That is about to change. Acxiom, one of the most secretive and prolific collectors of consumer information, is embarking on a novel public relations strategy: openness. On Wednesday, it plans to unveil a free Web site where United States consumers can view some of the information the company has collected about them, just as Mr. Howe did.

The data on the site, called AbouttheData.com, includes biographical facts, like education level, marital status and number of children in a household; homeownership status, including mortgage amount and property size; vehicle details, like the make, model and year; and economic data, like whether a household member is an active investor with a portfolio greater than $150,000. Also available will be the consumer’s recent purchase categories, like plus-size clothing or sports products; and household interests like golf, dogs, text-messaging, cholesterol-related products or charities.

Each entry comes with an icon that visitors can click to learn about the sources behind the data — whether self-reported consumer surveys, warranty registrations or public records like voter files. The program also lets people correct or suppress individual data elements, or to opt out entirely of having Acxiom collect and store marketing data about them.

AbouttheData.com is as much ruthlessly pragmatic as idealistic. Mr. Howe recognizes that regulation of his industry may be coming and that it’s better for Acxiom to be seen as a part of the solution than a part of the problem.

ONE afternoon in late August, Mr. Howe sat in an executive conference room at Acxiom’s headquarters overlooking the Arkansas River, demonstrating a version of AbouttheData.com that was still a work in progress. Having filled out an identity verification form that asked for his name, birth date, address and the last four digits of his Social Security number, he landed on a page that gave him a choice of six data categories to examine.

Visitors who log in may be surprised at the volume of information that may be available and the detailed picture it can give of their personal lives. The household interest section, for instance, listed Mr. Howe as interested in health and medical issues (he subscribes to health industry trade journals and founded a site called Health123.com); crafts (he periodically works with stained glass); woodworking (he paid for his undergraduate education at Princeton in part by working as an apprentice carpenter); tennis (he was on his high school team); gardening (his wife subscribes to Fine Gardening magazine); and “religious/inspirational.”

The home section, meanwhile, which listed such details as the year his house was built and its estimated market value, had incorrect information about his mortgage. “I don’t have a loan on my house anymore. It’s drawing on old data,” Mr. Howe explained. “That’s one I would absolutely go in and change.”

If a personal detail is corrected on the site, the new entry will appear with an aside noting the previous, incorrect entry, letting consumers see what they amended. Mr. Howe acknowledged that the system was fallible because Acxiom obtains information from many different suppliers, and the latest data is not always available in its databases. He said he couldn’t predict how Acxiom’s clients might react to a system that lets consumers update profiles and perhaps fictionalize them, or opt out altogether from Acxiom’s marketing database.

“What happens if a flock of people who are 45 decide to be 39?” Mr. Howe asked. “What happens if 20 percent of the American population decides to opt out? It would be devastating for our business.”

“Citizens don’t know what of our personal information is on file or how it is being used,”Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, wrote in an op-ed article in The Washington Post in August, asking companies like Acxiom to make their practices more transparent. She added: “This frames the fundamental challenge to consumer privacy in the online marketplace: our loss of control over our most private and sensitive information.”  

Perhaps the scariest part of data mining is the not knowing: What do these data brokers have on me? How do they see me in terms of marketing prey? Where does it all come from? Is anyone judging my predilection for impulse buys of cheesy romance e-books? Which is why it’s somewhat surprising that one company, Acxiom, is pulling back the curtain to show people not only some of what it has on them, but also a general idea of where that info came from.

The company launched AboutTheData.com today, a site which walks a user through a rundown of their lives once you grant it access. You have to provide your name, address, birthdate and last four digits of your Social Security Number in order for the company to make sure it’s accessing the right data, and says in its Privacy Policy that it might use that info in its data pursuits in the future. 

You can also opt out of the entire thing — no data collection or storing — but doing so will result in Acxiom targeting you with ads you might not even want, it explains. But clickingthat opt-out on the front page will only take you to the online, cookie-based opt-out. The full opt-out for mail and email is hidden here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/business/a-data-broker-offers-a-peek-behind-the-curtain.html?pagewanted=2 
http://consumerist.com/2013/09/04/data-broker-acxioms-new-site-allows-users-to-view-and-edit-the-marketing-info-its-collected/#more-10137010

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