Data brokers like Sift and Kustomer, which share consumers' est. lifetime value with companies, now share it with customers on request due to new privacy laws
Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients.
New York TimesKashmir Hill
Context & Ripple Effects
Data brokers have operated in near-total obscurity: a Vermont registration law forced companies that trade in third-party personal data to identify themselves, surfacing a list of 121 brokers operating in the US, while IDC projected vendor sales tripling to $10.1B by 2022. Firms like Sift and Kustomer sit inside that machine, scoring consumers' estimated lifetime value from signals as mundane as food orders and Airbnb messages and selling the analysis to client companies.
What changes here is direction: under new privacy laws, these brokers must hand the score to the person it describes on request. That turns a one-way surveillance product into a two-way record — and lands alongside earlier reporting that companies fulfilling such requests often have insecure practices for giving users their data and outsource identity verification.
First-order effects
Consumers can now request and see their own estimated-lifetime-value file from Sift and Kustomer, exposing for the first time how brokers price them from behavioral traces.
Sift and Kustomer must build request-handling and identity-verification workflows they never needed as business-to-business sellers, a compliance cost the related coverage shows many firms handle poorly.
Second-order effects
Marketers who relied on these opaque third-party profiles face buyers who know what the profile says, accelerating the pivot to collecting customer data directly through quizzes and events rather than renting broker analysis.
Established scorers are formalizing the same model at higher stakes — Equifax and FICO bundled the data behind consumer credit scores into a new Data Decision Cloud offering for financial companies and marketers — meaning more consumer-facing scores will exist and, eventually, be subject to the same access rights.
Third-order effects
If access rights keep expanding from credit-style data to behavioral scores, estimated lifetime value starts functioning like an informal credit rating — something consumers can see, dispute, and potentially litigate over, echoing the misuse liability Vermont already wrote into its broker law.
The structural endpoint is a split market: regulated, transparent broker scoring on one side, and a growing first-party data economy where brands build profiles themselves to avoid the disclosure burden entirely.
The trend: Privacy laws are converting data brokers' opaque consumer scoring into records individuals can access, pushing the marketing data economy toward first-party collection.
There are many companies in the business of secretly rating & scoring you. Now, thanks to new privacy laws, you can peek into their files on you. https://www.nytimes.com/...
The fact that obscure companies are accumulating information about years of our online and offline behavior is unsettling, and at a minimum it creates the potential for abuse or discrimination — particularly when those companies decide we don't stack up. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
Sift said it had gotten over 8,000 data requests by midday yesterday. Today the Google form for submissions that we linked in the story has been closed. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
CCPA (California's GDPR) is revealing what many adtech already knew. Real privacy violators are no name data brokers tracking & selling everything you do to advertisers & service companies not big tech platforms for whom your data attention not data is key https://www.nytimes.com…
It's interesting that we get upset about China openly creating a social score for its citizens; and yet we don't pass national laws to keep US companies from secretly creating the same social scores: https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Sift knew, for example, that I'd used my iPhone to order chicken tikka masala, vegetable samosas and garlic naan on a Saturday night in April three years ago. It knew I used my Apple laptop to sign into Coinbase in January 2017 to change my password...” https://www.nytimes.com/.…
Credit scores were just the start! There's a hidden leaderboard where every company you interact with tracks all your interactions and ranks/rates them. Every word/action IRL is converted to a data point, and assigned a weight. Good read from @kashhill https://www.nytimes.com/...…
As consumers, we all have “secret scores”: hidden ratings that determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive. https://www.staradvertiser.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Basically we already have the social credit system the Chinese have, it just isn't run by the government. Not sure this is much better. (as always, @kashhill does a great job on tech stories that affect us all) https://twitter.com/...
“I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I'd ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I'd opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone,” @kashhill writes https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here's how to get a copy of what they have on you.” https://twitter.com/...
Lessons from this story: 1) data scoring companies: 🤮🤮🤮 2) thank you California privacy laws. 3) call your Airbnb hosts; don't type anything into that app. https://twitter.com/...
From the @nytimes newsroom: “Sift knew, for example, that I'd used my iPhone to order chicken tikka masala, vegetable samosas and garlic naan on a Saturday night in April three years ago,” writes @kashhill https://www.nytimes.com/...