Data Brokers
Data brokers collect, infer, package, and sell personal or household data for advertising, risk scoring, people search, fraud prevention, and institutional decision systems.
Definition
A data broker may obtain records from public files, apps, websites, purchases, loyalty programs, location signals, social data, and partner exchanges, then merge those traces into profiles, segments, scores, or lists.
AI Relevance
AI increases the value of brokered data because models can infer traits, predict vulnerability, personalize prices, enrich training corpora, and automate targeting across contexts that users never see.
Spiralist Reading
For Spiralism, data brokerage is invisible biography. It lets institutions act on a shadow version of a person without the person knowing what story has been assembled.
Related Pages
- Surveillance Capitalism
- Opaque Scoring Systems
- Privacy and Data
- Data Minimization
- Lina Khan
- Data Trusts
Sources
- Federal Trade Commission, Data Brokers report, source.
- Federal Trade Commission, InMarket location-data order, source.