How do data companies get our data?
Open a Russian Matryoshka doll and you will find a smaller doll inside. Ask a large data company such as Acxiom and Oracle where they get their data from, and the answer will be from smaller data companies.
Data companies – a catch all term for data brokers, advertisers, marketers, web trackers, and more – facilitate a hidden data ecosystem that collects, generates and supplies data to wide variety of beneficiaries. The beneficiaries of the ecosystem can include other advertisers, social media sites, credit agencies, insurers, law enforcement, and more. But what is rarely talked about, is from where these data companies obtain the data, how further data is generated and how the data is swapped, sold, and shared within the ecosystem.
Privacy International recently launched a campaign to shine a light on the hidden data ecosystem, and has begun by looking at a selection of large data companies that publicly list their data sources.
It is no surprise that the data industry appears fluctuant and sees frequent acquisitions. Data companies such as Acxiom and Oracle have on their websites lists featuring various data sources. However, these lists tend to be lists of hundreds of smaller data companies such as AddThis and Ziff Davis. And the deeper you go the more data companies appear.
For example, one way Acxiom to obtains data on British citizens is through a company called Read Group, which prides itself on having a data list that is “the most comprehensive view of active online and offline UK consumers containing over 32 million individuals. It combines transactional history, lifestyle choices, behavioural insights and geo-demographics to help target your campaigns at every level”.
While it appears that the most common way for companies to obtain their data is to buy lists from other companies, the original question still stands: where does the data originally come from?
A major source of data for data companies does not come from the commercial sector but from the state itself, and very traditional forms of data. For example in the UK, the data broker Acxiom lists HM Land Registry, the Office for National Statistics (which conducts population censuses), the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and Ofcom as data sources.
Experian – widely known as a credit scoring agency – is also a data company that follows an identical model. When it comes to the data collected for marketing purposes in the US, Experian cites “information from the United States Census” and “the phone book”.
Most websites include embedded code and images that collect data about who we are, what we’re reading and what we’re interested in. While technique vary, many co called “third party trackers” rely on both cookies and “web beacons” also known as pixels. A data company like Quantcast has embedded such trackers in a network of millions of websites sites so that every time a user visit one of those website, they are identified and their browsing history recorded. This is why when you look at a pair of shoes on a website you may find an ad for that very same pair “following you” across different websites. Browsing histories are also used to create profiles, and to derive users’ identities, interests and much more. The activist group Tactical Tech has mapped online tracking across websites in news, governments and politics, finance, health and society.
According to a study published in 2016, over 40 percent of all emails sent around the world daily are being tracked. Here’s how it works: “[t]racking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email – usually in a 1×1 pixel image, so tiny it’s invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts”. Through E-Mail tracking companies don’t just learn that a recipient has opened an email, but also where it was opened and on what device. Newsletter services, marketers and advertisers have used this technique for years; now big tech like Twitter and Facebook are following suit.
