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Showing posts from August, 2018

The Billion Dollar Industry You Know Next to Nothing About

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There is an entire industry out there committed to gathering and selling your personal information. They operate with almost no regulation, and many individuals aren’t even aware of their existence or how their information is being used.  Data brokers, as they’re known, use your ambivalence to their advantage. They gather the information you provide via the internet and daily life, regularly. They collect your personal information from a variety of nonpublic and public sources: forms you fill out while shopping online, your social media, the interactions you have with public institutions (weddings, deaths, registration of your vehicles, etc.) all end up producing information about you. Fortunately, there is a way to remove personal information from Google . According to the The New York Times , one data broker’s servers “process more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consume