“Cyberazzi” – Data Mining Companies Investigated for Invasion of Privacy

by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog
January 21st, 2013

The paparazzi hide in bushes and use telephoto lenses to snap pictures of celebrities. The “cyberazzi” parachute into web browsers and sneak up behind mobile phones to spy on ordinary people. Nine such data mining companies must report what personal information they gather for sale by next week.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has placed a deadline of February 1st for the nine companies - Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, Peekyou, Rapleaf and Recorded Future - to answer a series of questions that what data they gather from online activities, how often they gather the data and whether they get permission first and how they resell it ie with any kind of identifying data.