[Vision2020] Consumer Data, but Not for Consumers

[Art Deco]

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July 21, 2012
Consumer Data, but Not for Consumers By NATASHA SINGER

BUPKIS. Zilch. Zip. Niente. Zero. Nada.

I recently asked to see the information held about me by the Acxiom
Corporation <http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/>, a database marketing
company that collects and sells details about consumers’ financial status,
shopping and recreational activities to banks, retailers, automakers and
other businesses. In investor presentations and interviews, Acxiom
executives have said that the company — the subject of a Sunday
Business article
last month<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html?ref=natashasinger>—
has information on about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with
about 1,500 data points per person. Acxiom also promotes a program for
consumers who wish to see the information the company has on them.

As a former pharmaceuticals industry reporter who has researched all kinds
of diseases, drugs and quack cures online, I wanted to learn, for one,
whether Acxiom had pegged me as concerned about arthritis, diabetes or
allergies. Acxiom also has a proprietary household classification system
that places people in one of 70 socioeconomic categories, like “Downtown
Dwellers” or “Flush Families,” and I hoped to discover the caste to which
it had assigned me.

But after I filled out an online request form and sent a personal check for
$5 to cover the processing fee, the company simply sent me a list of some
of my previous residential addresses. In other words, rather than learning
the details about myself that marketers might use to profile and judge me,
I received information I knew already.

It turns out that Acxiom, based in Little Rock, Ark., furnishes consumers
only with data related to risk management, like their own prison records,
tax liens, bankruptcy filings and residential histories. For a corporate
client, the company is able to match customers by name with, say, the
social networks or Internet providers they use, but it does not offer
consumers the same information about themselves.

Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, Acxiom’s chief privacy
officer<http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/corporate-governance/company-leadership/jennifer-barrett-glasgow/>,
said that the company kept consumer data in different databases and that
its system was not designed to assemble all the information it had amassed
on a single person.

“We do not have the capability to look up an individual’s data in the
system,” Ms. Barrett Glasgow said. “We don’t have a search-by-name
capability.”

Data brokers like Acxiom have developed advanced techniques to collect and
collate information about consumers’ offline, online and mobile behavior.
But they have been slow to develop innovative ways for consumers to gain
access to the information that companies obtain, share and sell about them
for marketing purposes.

Now federal regulators are pressuring data brokers to operate more
transparently. In a report earlier this year, the Federal Trade
Commission<http://www.ftc.gov/os/2012/03/120326privacyreport.pdf>recommended
that the industry set up a public Web portal that would display
the names and contact information of data brokers, as well as describe
consumers’ data access rights and other choices.

Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade
Commission<http://www.ftc.gov/commissioners/brill/index.shtml>,
said consumers should have access to all the details that data brokers
collect on them, as well as any analyses that the companies sell about
their behavior.

“I include in that not just the raw data, but also how that information has
been analyzed to place the consumer into certain categories for marketing
or other purposes,” she said. “I believe that giving consumers this kind of
granularity will greatly increase consumer trust in the information flow
process and will lead to more accurate marketing.”

At the moment, however, information brokers have wildly different policies.
Acxiom lets people opt
out<http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/privacy/optout/>of its
marketing databases, while Epsilon, another marketing services firm,
allows
people to opt out<http://www.epsilon.com/epsilon-consumer-preference-center>of
having their data rented to third parties. Epsilon says it will also
furnish individuals, upon request, with general information about their
past retail transactions — including the categories and years of purchase.
But it does not include exact product or retailer names.

Andrew Frawley, the president of Epsilon, says his company has set up a
task force to explore giving consumers greater access and choices.

“We agree in principle that more transparency is better,” he said.

But setting up a system for consumers to gain access to their own marketing
data could be costly and technically challenging for data brokers, said Stuart
Madnick, a professor of information
technology<http://web.mit.edu/smadnick/www/home.html>at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Companies would have to
develop security systems to verify a consumer’s identity and to ensure that
no one else could have access to that individual’s record, he said. At the
same time, they would have to be prepared to respond to people who
questioned the accuracy of the records.

“How correct is the information they have and are disseminating on you?”
Professor Madnick asked. “How do they know who is asking for it?”

Information security experts said data brokers might be reluctant to make
public access easier lest consumers react by wanting to opt out of the data
collection process altogether.

In early May, when I first looked at Acxiom’s Web site, the online request
form that required consumers to submit their Social
Security<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>numbers
and other sensitive personal information was not encrypted. (Ms.
Barrett Glasgow said the company quickly identified and fixed a broken link
that had caused the problem.) After I submitted my application, I didn’t
hear back from the company for several weeks. Subsequently, I left a voice
mail message on Acxiom’s consumer hot line. Nobody called back.

“It sounds like this form was not a high priority for them,” said Richard
M. Smith, the founder of Boston Software Forensics <http://www.bsf-llc.com/>,
a consulting firm, and an expert on Internet security. Requiring consumers
to mail in a personal check as part of the verification process, he added,
seemed old-fashioned and cumbersome. “It’s so last century. Why are you
making it so inconvenient?”

After I reported in the article last month that Acxiom had not responded to
my data request, a company representative e-mailed me to verify that I was
indeed the person who had requested her file. Then Acxiom e-mailed me an
encrypted report containing a list of my previous residential addresses.

Several days later, Ms. Barrett Glasgow called to explain the delay in
processing: Acxiom receives, on average, fewer than 100 requests a year
from consumers, she said, and my check had “ended up on someone’s desk that
was on vacation.” She said she would look into why company representatives
hadn’t returned my voice mail message.

“We’ll try to take some action to improve and clean up the program,” she
said. “We don’t want to make it hard to do, risky to do, or leave a bad
impression in the individual’s mind.”

BUT I still wanted to know the financial, retail, travel, health and hobby
details that Acxiom might have collected about me. So I e-mailed Ms.
Barrett Glasgow last month, asking to see at least some of my data and to
find out the socioeconomic category in which Acxiom had placed me.

Ms. Barrett Glasgow was on vacation last week and could not be reached for
comment.

Commissioner Brill of the F.T.C. said she could not comment on specific
companies. But she said the reluctance of the data broker industry to show
consumers their own records reminded her of an earlier era, when consumer
reporting agencies — companies that track and sell information about
people’s credit histories — protested that it would be too expensive and
time-consuming for them to show individuals the same reports that creditors
could see. In 1996, Congress updated the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970,
giving people greater access to the files that those agencies held about
them. Today, consumers can easily gain access to their credit
reports<http://topics.nytimes.com/your-money/credit/credit-scores/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>online.

“What the credit reporting industry did was change their point of view from
client-oriented to consumer-oriented, and develop the tools and technology
to allow consumers to see what’s in their reports and ensure it is
accurate,” Ms. Brill said. “The data broker industry could do the exact
same thing.”

E-mail: slipstream at nytimes.com.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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