Data brokers: The most influential industry you’ve never heard of
The competition regulator is looking into whether the US$200 billion industry is harming Australian consumers.
Facebook regularly ranks as among the world’s least trusted brands thanks in part to how it uses data. Yet in Australia and abroad there are companies harvesting, refining and selling your information with even less oversight.
Known as “data brokers”, their business model is to collect information on you, package it and then sell it to the likes of banks and insurers. Some experts are alarmed by how much sensitive information these companies can have on you, and who that data can be bought by.
The competition regulator is sufficiently concerned to have announced an investigation into whether data brokers were harming Australian consumers.
“There is little transparency and awareness of how data brokers operate in Australia despite the vast amounts of information they collect about Australian consumers and the central role they play in enabling the exchange of information between businesses,” ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said in July, when the watchdog called for public submissions into its inquiry.
