A look at how data brokers identify people and how much personal information they sell as IDC forecasts data vendor sales will triple to $10.1B by 2022
There are many personal details that Paul-Olivier Dehaye is willing to share online, but the behaviour of his bladder is not one of them. Tweets: @carnage4life and @financialtimes Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Data brokers buy information such as your credit card history, home rental information, websites you visit, etc then sell that data to advertisers who then use that to target you with ads on Facebook. Your data is sold and GIVEN to Facebook not vice versa http://www.ft.com/... @financialtimes : Data brokers mine a treasure trove of personal, locational and transactional data to build up a picture of an individual's life, and then sell this to a range of companies. Here's a look at how much of your personal information data brokers share about you http://www.ft.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands at the start of a transparency arc that the related coverage then traces forward: within months of IDC's $10.1B-by-2022 forecast, Vermont's new registration rule produced a roster of 121 US data brokers — the first consolidated view of an industry that had operated largely out of sight. The article's core mechanic is the one ProPublica had already documented: Facebook buys detailed offline profiles from commercial data brokers and folds them into ad targeting without disclosing it, because the data is 'widely available'.
What makes the story durable is how the supply chain later came under pressure from both directions — state laws exposing who sells what, and privacy statutes forcing brokers like Sift and Kustomer to hand consumers their own inferred lifetime-value scores on request, while the ICCL later found brokers selling browsing data in finer detail than previously understood.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and Facebook get a quantified market signal: IDC's tripling forecast tells buyers that third-party audience data is becoming a larger line item in media budgets, not a free byproduct.
- Consumers gain a concrete picture of what is traded — credit card history, rental records, site visits — and, per the later Sift/Kustomer coverage, a legal right to request the scores built on it.
Second-order effects
- State legislatures copy Vermont's registration model, but its weak compliance shows enforcement is the bottleneck: a registry exists on paper while few brokers file accurate disclosures.
- Platforms' targeting advantage becomes a liability — once Facebook's broker purchases are public knowledge, the platform carries reputational risk for data it did not collect itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the third-party data trade gets pushed toward regulated visibility — registries, access rights, and disclosure duties — reshaping an industry whose scale ($10.1B) depends on staying opaque.
- The eventual structural question raised by the ICCL findings is whether sensitive-category profiling (including on people in sensitive jobs) triggers targeted rules rather than general privacy law.
The trend: The data broker industry is moving from invisible commodity supplier to a regulated, consumer-visible layer of the ad economy, with state registries and access laws setting the pace.