The Federal Trade Commission is urging Congress to provide new legislation it says is needed to demand greater transparency and consumer control over the information collected by data brokers.
A report issued this week by the FTC, “Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability,” studied how these firms obtain and share consumer information, typically behind the scenes and without consumer knowledge, for marketing campaigns and fraud prevention. Raising privacy concerns, the report finds that data brokers collect and store billions of data elements covering nearly every U.S. consumer. For example, one of the brokers studied holds information on more than 1.4 billion consumer transactions and 700 billion data elements and another adds more than 3 billion new data points to its database each month.
