Companies secretly collecting and selling information about your online behavior The large-scale information collection, information sale, and free access to sensitive, private information, accompanied by inadequate regulatory controls, leaves much room for misuse. Those who desire to limit access to their personal details find themselves with scant options as, in a majority of instances, parties that collect data are able to categorize, store, and sell free or captured information without the consent of the concerned individual. Even in instances where information is voluntarily given to social networking or e-shopping websites, web users cannot control who the information will be sold to (Tsesis, 2014). The data industry is currently a three-hundred-billion-dollar-per-annum industry, with around three million employees in the US alone. Information brokers attempt to understand customer identity and interests. For organizational delivery of more relevant advertisements to customers, data-brokering companies have to provide information on services and products of potential interest to buyers. All data collected and used by them is legal, secure, and accurate. All kinds of businesses, right from small companies to Fortune 500 corporations, are clients of these companies (Morris & Lavandera, 2012).

Information is immensely valuable to individuals as well as companies. Data-brokering organizations’ critics claim average consumers are unaware of the fact that their sensitive information is sold by such sites. They assert that this constitutes a potential privacy risk. However, on the other hand is the fact that major decision-making...

Akin to a majority of other innovations, big data is a two-edged sword bringing with it immense benefits. It enables large-scale organizational personalization of services and products, facilitates business risk mitigation and drives novel business models and services (Buytendijk & Heiser, 2013). In this paper, the unanticipated harm to organizations and people if data scientists are permitted to run riot will be addressed.
The client base of information brokers is ever increasing, with clients keen on getting to know people’s spending habits, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, specific illnesses (like HIV/AIDS, depression, drug abuse, and diabetes), etc. Such data can be directly accessed from data brokers’ records or predicted using other data. Finding out what all personal data is being disseminated and correcting it is virtually impossible. To complicate matters, data brokering is a completely legal industry, with brokers known to be particularly secretive (Boutin, 2016).

Data brokerage’s main threat is that though several brokers (perhaps honestly) assert that they merely provide public information for preventing fraud or verifying people’s identity, the market for consumer scores is swiftly growing. Consumer scores refer to computer-generated numbers which try to predict one’s chances of clearing debts or falling ill (like FICO credit scores, though they are not regulated with regard to factors which may be utilized, score transparency, and contributory factors). This gives rise to the…