Who are the firms selling your data?
Offering handy parenting tips and £200 worth of vouchers, Emma’s Diary may have seemed like the perfect website for new parents to sign up to.
But in exchange for free nappies, they also gave consent for their data to be used for a mix of advertising purposes.
It has now emerged that the data was sold to the Labour Party in 2017, even though the consent did not extend to political parties.
The site now faces a fine for misuse of personal data.
The case is part of the Information Commissioner’s inquiry into political digital marketing, following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
What began with a look at the misuse of Facebook data has now has opened a window on the complex ecosystem of online advertising, and thrown light onto the opaque world of data brokerage.
Data has been described as the “new oil” and data brokers play a huge role in extracting value from our personal information in all its forms.
They collect it from hundreds of sources, including census information, surveys, public records and loyalty card programs.
They then sell that information to other organisations.
One researcher, writing about the role of data brokers back in 2014, described the entire industry as “largely invisible”.
It is an industry that has to date been unregulated, although the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU did put more onus on “data controllers” to ensure users understood how their information was being used.
Acxiom and Experian are probably the best-known data brokers – and they make a lot of money.
In the 2018 financial year, Acxiom is expected to make around $95m (£71m) and was recently bought by media advertising giant IPG.
But there are thousands of smaller players in the industry, alongside apps and websites that sign up users for one purpose, asking for consent to use their data, which is then sold on to advertisers.
As part of its inquiry, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) investigated Experian, Lifecyle Marketing (the owners of Emma’s Diary), CACI and Data8.
Digital campaigning is now hugely important for political parties.
