on 2.5 billion people worldwide. Health insurance companies, financial institutions, marketers, law enforcement agencies, criminal scammers, abusers, and other actors can buy these prepackaged data sets to profile, track, and target the people in them.Data brokers acquire information about people in three main ways.
The second collection vector is indirect. Data brokers will scrape public records, including voting registries and property records, to acquire data points like home address and phone number. People-search or white pages websites are data brokers that scrape these records, extract the data, and post it online for search and sale. Indirect collection also includes data brokers paying app developers to sell data on their own users .
Sometimes inference is simple, like seeing which apps are installed on a device. If someone has a Christian news app or aon their phone, that’s likely a strong indicator of their religion. The presence of LGBTQ+ dating apps on a phone, similarly, is likely a strong indicator that said person belongs to the LGBTQ+ community.