People, organizations, and government agencies with whom you transact personal or professional business have the right to collect personal information about you. Contrary to common sense, though, the personal information that is collected about you doesn’t belong to you. In most cases, the collected information belongs to the individual, organization, or agency that collected it. The important question becomes: To what purposes may the collected information be put? Sadly, it’s mostly available—for any use—to anyone willing to pay for it. This results in a relatively new industry called datawarehousing.
You’ve probably never heard of Acxiom Corporation. I certainly had never heard of the company until I began researching this book. Acxiom Corporation, based in Conway, Arkansas, is one of the country’s largest datawarehousing businesses.
Acxiom Corporation gathers, sorts, and warehouses information like credit card transactions, telephone numbers, real estate records, automobile registrations, Post Office change of address forms, fishing licenses, magazine subscription information, and just about every other scrap of information you can imagine on more than 195 million American citizens. Think of the paper trail of information you leave in the wake of your daily life. Then imagine that companies like Acxiom actively collect and refine it. Finally, imagine how accurate and complete a profile—almost certainly more accurate than we’d readily admit—can be formed, or “datamined” from these unrelated infobits.
Consider just the information available on your driver’s license. Age, height, weight, unlisted address, and medical conditions. In some states, your driver’s license number and your social security number are the same.
Marketers insist that the ability to compile highly refined electronic dossiers on individual consumers is completely harmless and actually even beneficial because it allows direct marketing to be finely targeted. Consumers benefit, marketers insist, from quicker credit approval processes and better telemarketing to more accurate and personalized insurance service.
Unlike credit reporting bureaus, datawarehousing and datamining firms are under no legal obligation to reveal the personal information their databases hold about us. According to a March 1998 Washington Post article, there are more than one thousand datawarehousers in America, a tenfold increase since 1991. The datawarehouse industry is led by three major organizations: Acxiom Corporation, R.L. Polk & Company, and Metromail Corporation.
According to the Washington Post article, faster computers have helped the growth of the datawarehousing and datamining industry:
“A database query that took six minutes on a giant mainframe computer in 1994 now takes nineteen seconds. Officials just announced they will soon be able to deliver massive amounts of data to customers over the Internet in a few hours—something that now takes up to a week.”
