data brokers

See the following -

Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out?

Bruce Schneier | CNN | March 1, 2016

Thefts of personal information aren't unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it's information that's needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it's stolen for purposes of embarrassment or coercion, as in the 2015 cases of Ashley Madison and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The latter exposed highly sensitive personal data that affects security of millions of government employees, probably to the Chinese...

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Facebook Is Expanding The Way It Tracks You And Your Data

Adrienne Lafrance | The Atlantic | June 12, 2014

The social giant is digging into information from your smartphone and tracking the other websites you visit.

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How Data Brokers Make Money Off Your Medical Records

Adam Tanner | Scientific American | February 1, 2016

A growing number of companies specialize in gathering longitudinal information from hundreds of millions of hospitals' and doctors' records, as well as from prescription and insurance claims and laboratory tests. Pooling all these data turns them into a valuable commodity. Other businesses are willing to pay for the insights that they can glean from such collections to guide their investments in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, or more precisely tailor an advertising campaign promoting a new drug...

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U.S. Regulator Urges Law To Force Disclosures By Data Brokers

Alina Selyukh | Reuters | May 27, 2014

Companies known as data brokers collect and sell information about "nearly all" U.S. consumers, drawing potentially harmful conclusions about them largely without their knowledge, U.S. regulators said on Tuesday. 

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Who Controls Your Smartphone? And How to Leverage Open Source to Prevent it from Spying on You

There are many things about today’s world that warrant us asking that question. Do you or the mobile vendor control your smartphones? If you are a consumer, small or medium business (SMB) -- the answer is the vendor...What if you are a large enterprise or a government agency? The answer is still the vendor...How can the user regain control? Not all vendors have locked devices and walled gardens. Google’s line of Pixel hardware, for example, is a mid-market solution whose bootloader allows locking and re-locking. Pixels support two versions of Android. Google Mobile Services (GMS), where free services are tied to data monetization and a UX like Apple and Samsung devices. Secondly, Pixels can run Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) code that shares the same strengths as the GMS build, but the customer controls the code base and updates. There are several companies that are selling AOSP operating system builds for Pixel and other unlockable/lockable mobile phones and tablets...

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