Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now, how big data is being tracked for commercial purposes.
You may not know of or have heard much about companies known as data brokers, but a recent government report says these companies actually know a lot about you and the information you share online, billions of pieces of data, actually.
Jeffrey Brown has the story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Are you a mobile mixer, an urban scrambler? Do you know what those mean or that you yourself might be characterized as one or the other?
According to a new study by the Federal Trade Commission, large companies called data brokers use such labels as they track our online buying habits, what we do in our free time, religious affiliations, and much, much more, in an industry the FTC says suffers from a fundamental lack of transparency.
It found that one company’s database alone had information that included 1.4 billion consumer transactions and more than 700 billion aggregated pieces of data. The FTC is calling on Congress to take new steps to protect consumers.
And its chairwoman, Edith Ramirez, joins us now to talk about it.
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