Data Brokers And The Need For Transparency And Accountability

This book is the result of a study of nine data brokers, representing a cross-section of the industry, undertaken by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to shed light on the data broker industry. Data brokers obtain and share vast amounts of consumer information, typically behind the scenes, without consumer knowledge. Data brokers sell this information for marketing campaigns and fraud prevention, among other purposes. Although consumers benefit from data broker practices which, for example, help enable consumers to find and enjoy the products and services they prefer, data broker practices also raise privacy concerns. The FTC found that data brokers operate with a fundamental lack of transparency. The Commission recommends that Congress consider enacting legislation to make data broker practices more visible to consumers and to give consumers greater control over the immense amounts of personal information about them collected and shared by data brokers.

In this report, the Federal Trade Commission discusses the results of an in-depth study of nine data brokers. These data brokers collect personal information about consumers from a wide range of sources and provide it for a variety of purposes, including verifying an individual's identity, marketing products, and detecting fraud. Because these companies generally never interact with consumers, consumers are often unaware of their existence, much less the variety of practices in which they engage. By reporting on the data collection and use practices of these nine data brokers, which represent a cross-section of the industry, this report attempts to shed light on the data broker industry and its practices. For decades, policymakers have expressed concerns about the lack of transparency of companies that buy and sell consumer data without direct consumer interaction. Indeed, the lack of transparency among companies providing consumer data for credit and other eligibility determinations led to the adoption of the Fair Credit Reporting Act ("FCRA"), a statute the Commission has enforced since its enactment in 1970. The FCRA covers the provision of consumer data by consumer reporting agencies where it is used or expected to be used for decisions about credit, employment, insurance, housing, and similar eligibility determinations; it generally does not cover the sale of consumer data for marketing and other purposes. While the Commission has vigorously enforced the FCRA, 1 since the late 1990s it has also been active in examining the practices of data brokers that fall outside the FCRA.

In this report, the Federal Trade Commission discusses the results of an in-depth study of nine data brokers. These data brokers collect personal information about consumers from a wide range of sources and provide it for a variety of purposes, including verifying an individual's identity, marketing products, and detecting fraud. Because these companies generally never interact with consumers, consumers are often unaware of their existence, much less the variety of practices in which they engage. By reporting on the data collection and use practices of these nine data brokers, which represent a cross-section of the industry, this report attempts to shed light on the data broker industry and its practices. For decades, policymakers have expressed concerns about the lack of transparency of companies that buy and sell consumer data without direct consumer interaction. Indeed, the lack of transparency among companies providing consumer data for credit and other eligibility determinations led to the adoption of the Fair Credit Reporting Act ("FCRA"), a statute the Commission has enforced since its enactment in 1970. The FCRA covers the provision of consumer data by consumer reporting agencies where it is used or expected to be used for decisions about credit, employment, insurance, housing, and similar eligibility determinations; it generally does not cover the sale of consumer data for marketing and other purposes. While the Commission has vigorously enforced the FCRA, 1 since the late 1990s it has also been active in examining the practices of data brokers that fall outside the FCRA.

Criminal activities in cyberspace are increasingly facilitated by burgeoning black markets. This report characterizes these markets and how they have grown into their current state to provide insight into how their existence can harm the information security environment. Understanding these markets lays the groundwork for exploring options to minimize their potentially harmful influence.

While its importance in domestic law has long been acknowledged, transparency has until now remained largely unexplored in international law. This study of transparency issues in key areas such as international economic law, environmental law, human rights law and humanitarian law brings together new and important insights on this pressing issue. Contributors explore the framing and content of transparency in their respective fields with regard to proceedings, institutions, law-making processes and legal culture, and a selection of cross-cutting essays completes the study by examining transparency in international law-making and adjudication.

The increase in connected devices in the internet of things (IoT) is leading to an exponential increase in the data that an organization is required to manage. To successfully utilize IoT in businesses, big data analytics are necessary in order to efficiently sort through the increased data. The combination of big data and IoT can thus enable new monitoring services and powerful processing of sensory data streams. The Handbook of Research on Big Data and the IoT is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on emerging trends and recent innovative applications of big data and IoT, challenges facing organizations and the implications of these technologies on society, and best practices for their implementation. While highlighting topics such as bootstrapping, data fusion, and graph mining, this publication is ideally designed for IT specialists, managers, policymakers, analysts, software engineers, academicians, and researchers.

This book elucidates and maps the societal impact of experience and heritage, participation, and entrepreneurship in the cultural sector. The contributions address and explore the relevance of culture, cultural entities, and heritage as collective memories and reservoirs of experience for other social systems, change and societal innovators like entrepreneurs. Insofar, cultural activities can be understood as a bridge between past experiences and future challenges. The first key focus is the participation of people in various contexts, initiatives, and projects. Such participation unleashes creativity and connects different societal layers – culture, economy, and innovation. Accordingly, a second focus is the entrepreneurial efforts and ideas that originate within arts and culture. Readers will find critical empirical and theoretical studies that challenge the current understandings of the cultural sector from different theoretical perspectives and with different methodological approaches. A variety of topics are explored within the thematic areas of cultural heritage, managerial practices, participation, and cultural entrepreneurship, as well as their inter-relations. Ultimately the aim is to provide the reader with a better understanding of the sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually fertilizing areas of the arts, culture, business, management, and innovation. The book will be of interest to scholars, students, professionals, and policymakers.

Businesses are rushing to collect personal data to fuel surging demand. Data enthusiasts claim personal information that's obtained from the commercial internet, including mobile platforms, social networks, cloud computing, and connected devices, will unlock path-breaking innovation, including advanced data security. By contrast, regulators and activists contend that corporate data practices too often disempower consumers by creating privacy harms and related problems. As the Internet of Things matures and facial recognition, predictive analytics, big data, and wearable tracking grow in power, scale, and scope, a controversial ecosystem will exacerbate the acrimony over commercial data capture and analysis. The only productive way forward is to get a grip on the key problems right now and change the conversation. That's exactly what Jules Polonetsky, Omer Tene, and Evan Selinger do. They bring together diverse views from leading academics, business leaders, and policymakers to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the new data economy.

Analyzes the regulation of data access and transfer to understand how internet users can obtain the data they generate.