Happy Holidays From All The Businesses Watching You!

Nothing reveals more about you than your personal shopping habits and traits.

When and where you shop, what you shop for and how you pay for your purchases, is all "data treasure" to organizations which make it their business to collect and sell information on us all.

Collecting and selling data on American consumers is nothing new. But advances in technology have made it possible to gather vast amounts of personal information on every man, woman, and child living in America today from multiple sources and hold that information in perpetuity.

No matter your socio-economic status or background, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of databases out there actively seeking to collect and analyze information on you every day.

Most likely you have never heard of these organizations, let alone come into contact with them.  But they most definitely know who you are!

Who uses your collected data?

Primarily, collected data is still used for direct marketing and promotional purposes.  In other words, to sell you something.

Data Brokers: Know All About You!

But banks, government agencies (including law enforcement authorities) insurance companies, health care providers and law offices also now use this aggregated data for a variety of different purposes.

This includes identity and residence verification checks along with mode of living and lifestyle analysis.

How do they obtain your data?

For many years public record information along with completed product warranty cards, magazine subscriptions, and mail order purchases were the predominant source of information used to develop databases on us all.

Today, data from so-called 'contributors' which includes businesses prepared to betray the trust of their customers by sharing their personally identifiable information (name, address, telephone, etc.) with third party organizations known as data brokers or information brokers is common practice.

Interestingly, data brokers are described in privacy notices as business partners or affiliates.

Both privacy advocates and consultants who work in the consumer data field agree that privacy notices are open to interpretation and prone to ambiguous or worse intentionally misleading statements.

So consider this when you are shopping for gifts and goodies this holiday season, whether you're using a credit card or store loyalty card or both at the pharmacy,  supermarket or any other location which has the ability to identify you and most definitely online.

What you buy, where you purchase it from and how you pay for it will all be collected and stored for future analysis and most likely contribute to your "bucket profile."

Happy holidays from all the businesses and data brokers watching you this festive season!