Your data makes everyone money but you… Here’s how they do it…
Conway, Arkansas is home to one of the largest processors of consumer data that you have probably never heard of, where every millisecond counts. Acxiom Corporation’s network menu sports more than 23,000 computer servers that collect, collate and analyze consumer data daily.
“It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.” (Singer, “NYT”).
Gizmodo defined Acxiom as the faceless organization that knows everything about you.
“Unsurprisingly, it makes its money by selling its information, to customers like Wells Fargo, HSBC, Toyota, Ford, and even Macy’s. In truth, it will sell data to anyone who can afford to buy it. Business seems to be booming, too: last year, it posted a profit of $77.26 million on sales of $1.13 billion”. –Gizmodo
Acxiom has a reputation of collecting data better than anyone else. They collect everything including websites, loyalty programs, retail point-of-sale data, self-reported sources, public records, employment drug testing data, background checks, criminal histories, birth records, education data, vehicle identification numbers, driver’s licenses, marriage licenses, and you can bet that they know what kitty litter brand you buy for your feline too.
Adding more big dogs to the data-mining mix – such as Alliance Data,BlueKai, Epsilon, EXelate, Facebook, Google, Intellidyn, RapLeaf, and Yahoo!; all profit from taking your information. The sheer scale of this data has far exceeded human sense-making capabilities.
”Our personal data is collected, categorized and filtered by Facebook’s interface and sold off to advertisers. Every message we send to one another is read and filed, every website we visit is recorded and every photo we post is scanned.” –Matthew Schmid
Presidential Campaigns use Big Data too
One of the hottest jobs in Presidential campaigns today is that of the Data Mining Scientist:
“…whose job it is to sort through terabytes of data and billions of behaviors tracked in voter files, consumer databases, and site logs. They’ll use the numbers to uncover hidden patterns that predict how you’ll vote, if you’ll pony up with a donation, and if you’ll influence your friends to support a candidate.” -SXSW
Buxton, [a secretive data-mining project] topped AP news this morning, revealing how presidential candidate, Mitt Romney was able to target rich republican donors across the U.S.
The Secrecy…
There is no doubt that data-mining is big business. Corporations are making tens of millions of dollars harvesting our data while dining on Beluga caviar .
Our society is literally being transformed into a technological monitoring grid. Virtually everything we do is monitored, tracked and recorded in some way. If we are not very careful, eventually we could end up living in a society that is much more oppressive than anything George Orwell ever dreamed of. –The Economic Collapse
