It’s likely you’ve never heard of companies like Acxiom, Experian, or Datalogix. But they have heard about you.

These are the behind-the-scenes firms that collect disparate data about hundreds of millions of American consumers and sell that data to retailers, advertisers, credit agencies, and other businesses who want to know as much as possible about their target markets. They’ve operated with minimal scrutiny for years, but more recently have come under closer watch by Congress and federal regulators, especially as the multi-billion dollar industry is able to more easily harvest vast amounts of data by tracking people’s Internet and mobile activities.





A sampling of the data they collect, from a 35-page Senate committee investigation, was recently highlighted and summarized by ArsTechnica:

“Beyond publicly available information such as home addresses and phone numbers, data brokers maintain data as specific as whether consumers view a high volume of YouTube videos, the type of car they drive, ailments they may have such as depression or diabetes, whether they are a hunter, what types of pets they have; or whether they have purchased a particular shampoo product in the last six months…”

For anyone who has followed the data tracking industry, this level of detail that anonymous firms aggregate may be disturbing, but it’s not actually all that shocking. In addition to actual data, they also sell modeled data–profiles of, say, whether someone is likely to own a SUV, based on all of what the firm knows about an individual and individuals similar to them.

What’s perhaps most concerning in the report is the way the firms then use this data to classify people into “buckets” and sell their profiles to third-parties.

Some buckets define the privileged and well-off, such as “Power Couples,” “Established Elite,” and “Just Sailing Along.” Others specifically are meant to target the financially and emotionally vulnerable, as you can see in the graphic above. Some examples include “Fragile Families,” “Zero Mobility,” “Ethnic Second-City Strugglers,” and “Living on Loans: Young Urban Single Parents.”

Experian, according to the Senate report, describes its category “Hard Times” as follows: