Sunday, June 17, 2012

Information privacy


You for Sale: Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome

By NATASHA SINGER
Few consumers may have heard of Acxiom, a database marketer. But it has amassed the world's largest commercial data trove about them, analysts say.
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IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.
It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.
Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called theAcxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing/.../
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