The paparazzi hide in bushes and use telephoto lenses to snap pictures of celebrities. The \u201ccyberazzi\u201d parachute into web browsers and sneak up behind mobile phones to spy on ordinary people. Nine such data mining companies must report what personal information they gather for sale by Feb 1, 2013.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has placed a deadline of February 1st for the nine companies – Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, Peekyou, Rapleaf and Recorded Future – to answer a series of questions <\/a>that what data they gather from online activities, how often they gather the data and whether they get permission first and how they resell it ie with any kind of identifying data.<\/p>\n While the names of the companies may sound obscure, these companies silently lurk inside popular websites and games like Facebook and Farmville<\/a>. Take RapLeaf \u2013 based in San Francisco, California \u2013 that has over a billion names and associated data harvested from unsuspecting visitors to websites like About.com which it sells to political campaigns. A recent Wall Street Journal article described how the company provided data to a Republican campaign for a Senate campaign in New Hampshire<\/a>.<\/p>\n Acxiom of Conway, Arkansas, claims to have data on 500 million active consumers around the world, with about 1,500 data \u201cpoints\u201d per person derived from over 50 trillion data \u201ctransactions\u201d a year. \u201cDo you really know your customers?\u201d an Acxiom sales pitch asks. \u201cSimply asking for name and address information poses many challenges: transcription errors, increased checkout time and, worse yet, losing customers who feel that you\u2019re invading their privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n The company \u2013 which was ranked as the top advertising agency in the United States by Advertising Age magazine<\/a> \u2013 has managed databases for 47 out of the Fortune 100 companies. One of the products it offers is a \u201crace model\u201d that a report in the New York Times noted \u201cprovides information on the major racial categories<\/a>: Caucasians, Hispanics, African-Americans, or Asians.\u201d<\/p>\n Recorded Future of Cambridge, Massachusetts \u2013 which has the dubious distinction of being funded by both the Central Intelligence Agency and Google<\/a>\u00a0 \u2013 mines articles, blogs and Twitter for information that it analyzes. \u201cOur customers are some of the largest corporations in the world <\/a>that are interested in world events, hedge funds who do political risk-trading and even government agencies,\u201d founder Christopher Ahlberg told the Financial Times.<\/p>\n In 2011, Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the FTC, coined the word \u201ccyberazzi\u201d<\/a> to describe these data companies. Last year his agency issued a report titled \u201cProtecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change<\/a>\u201d which set out a series of recommendations including recommending \u201ctargeted legislation to provide greater transparency for, and control over, the practices of information brokers.\u201d<\/p>\n While one arm of the U.S. government is concerned about protecting the privacy of consumer, at least two other government agencies are looking to hire such companies to help them spy on citizens.<\/p>\n Last January the Federal Bureau of Investigation posted a request for an application that would allow it to \u201cprovide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter<\/a> \u2026 and (i)mmediately translate foreign language tweets into English.\u201d<\/p>\n And about ten days ago the Transportation Security Administration asked data broker companies to propose applications \u201cto generate an assessment of the risk to the aviation transportation system that may be posed by a specific individual<\/a>\u201d using \u201cspecific sources of current, accurate, and complete non-governmental data.\u201d The initial plan is to use it to screen volunteer flyers who will be offered the benefits of \u201cexpedited screening lanes \u2026 leave on their shoes, light outerwear and belts, as well as leave laptops and \u2026 compliant liquids in carry-on bags.\u201d<\/p>\n The biggest problem with mining online social media is the likelihood that it could make major mistakes, Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties for Stanford University\u2019s Center for Internet and Society, told the NextGov website. \u201cYou can have 15 percent accuracy for advertising\u201d she said. \u201cBut if you are getting 85 percent of it wrong when you are denying people government benefits or sending out police to interview them, that would be completely wasteful and dangerous<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n