Reading a blog on Acxiom Corporation making billion dollar of sales having over 1,500  data points on half a billion people makes me think what future does a privacy free internet hold for us. On one side we want to see internet to be freed from government regulation, on the other hand we as a community doing a very little on protecting individual privacy.

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I have always been annoyed receiving tele-marketing calls at all odd times of the day for the things I am rarely interested in. There is also a great deal of emails (used to be called junk) gets delivered in my mail box instead of junk box, which are somewhat targeted and related to something I might be interested in. I have spent a lot of time in earlier my life doing mail server administration. Seeing these emails makes me think that how far we have come after we started fighting SPAM. Now first they want to know everything about you.

I am no high valued customer but I always get this feeling that people targeting me has a fair deal of idea on who I am, what I do, what I am looking for. I understand sharing and publishing my information online/offline has made me a part of many marketing database. In these case I would like to refer to this known quote “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold” but then the question is how many times they would sell my information complete or incomplete, right or wrong to how many people? Is there a limit on how many time can I be targeted of my information can be sold?

I know many countries has a national DND data base, if you register you and still receive unwanted call you can take some action against them, but I don’t know of any authority which can protect me against my information being traded in an open/private market.

I surely would like to see a community to guideline for such activity where user rights more importantly human rights to comes first

Read more on what you can do to protect yourself from being targeted by random information collectors

Do not track IE, firefox, chrome? Who is on your side?

Who is tracking you online? The BIG Brothers? So many of them?

Inspired by

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

“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 the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.”

The Faceless Organization That Knows Everything About You

“We all know such organizations exist, of course, by Acxiom operates on a terrifying scale. The Times reports that Acxiom’s servers process more than 50 trillion data transactions a year. Its database, apparently, contains information about 500 million consumer worldwide—including the majority of US adults— and on average holds 1,500 data points for each of them.”

Tag: Privacy, data, security, information, internet, Acxiom Corporation, protection, tele marketing, spam