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<div class="timestamp">July 21, 2012</div>
<h1>Consumer Data, but Not for Consumers</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span><span>NATASHA SINGER</span></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
BUPKIS. Zilch. Zip. Niente. Zero. Nada. </p>
<p>
I recently asked to see the information held about me by <a title="Company information." href="http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/">the Acxiom Corporation</a>,
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 <a title="Article about Acxiom on June 17, 2012." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html?ref=natashasinger">article last month</a>
— 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.
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
<a title="Company information about Ms. Barrett Glasgow." href="http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/corporate-governance/company-leadership/jennifer-barrett-glasgow/">Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, Acxiom’s chief privacy officer</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
Now federal regulators are pressuring data brokers to operate more transparently. <a title="The F.T.C. report." href="http://www.ftc.gov/os/2012/03/120326privacyreport.pdf">In a report earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission</a>
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. </p>
<p>
<a title="Information about Commissioner Brill." href="http://www.ftc.gov/commissioners/brill/index.shtml">Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
At the moment, however, information brokers have wildly different policies. Acxiom <a title="Acxiom opt-out policy." href="http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/privacy/optout/"> lets people opt out</a> of its marketing databases, while Epsilon, another marketing services firm, <a title="Epsilon opt-out policy." href="http://www.epsilon.com/epsilon-consumer-preference-center">allows people to opt out</a>
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.
</p>
<p>
Andrew Frawley, the president of Epsilon, says his company has set up a
task force to explore giving consumers greater access and choices.
</p>
<p>
“We agree in principle that more transparency is better,” he said. </p>
<p>
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 <a title="Information about Professor Madnick." href="http://web.mit.edu/smadnick/www/home.html">Stuart Madnick, a professor of information technology</a>
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. </p>
<p>
“How correct is the information they have and are disseminating on you?”
Professor Madnick asked. “How do they know who is asking for it?”
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
In early May, when I first looked at Acxiom’s Web site, the online request form that required consumers to submit their <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about Social Security." class="meta-classifier">Social Security</a>
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. </p>
<p>
“It sounds like this form was not a high priority for them,” said <a title="The company’s site." href="http://www.bsf-llc.com/">Richard M. Smith, the founder of Boston Software Forensics</a>,
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?” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
Ms. Barrett Glasgow was on vacation last week and could not be reached for comment. </p>
<p>
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 <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/your-money/credit/credit-scores/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about credit scores." class="meta-classifier">credit reports</a> online. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<div class="authorIdentification">
<p>E-mail: <a href="mailto:slipstream@nytimes.com">slipstream@nytimes.com</a>. </p> </div>
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