The companies making money off your drinking habits and STDs

Data brokers are almost as old as marketing. The junk mail that slips under your door was likely routed there by an address list compiled by one of these firms.

But in the digital era, data brokers are doing what they could have only dreamed of a few decades ago. They are now able to scrape up an extraordinary wealth of your private information – and of an increasingly sensitive kind. Data brokers know your politics, your weight and the age of your kids. And there's a good chance they know if you drink too much, battle depression or have ever been raped.

These new capabilities – almost entirely unregulated – have data brokers making big money and privacy activists warning about where that data could end up.

There are no laws stopping a major employer from buying a list of alcoholics, for example, and crosschecking potential hires against it.

Without asking why we needed them, the Chicago-based data broker ExactData offered to sell America Tonight all kinds of lists, such as the names, homes and email addresses of people who date online, people who gamble and people who suffer anxiety and erectile dysfunction. For $4,500, we could have purchased access to deeply intimate information of thousands of people. (We did not.)

The CEO of ExactData later guaranteed to America Tonight that we wouldn’t have been able to actually buy any of the lists; we just hadn't gotten far enough in the process to be denied. So we called his bluff, buying a $400 list of people suffering from incontinence, including their names, home addresses and emails – no questions asked. 

It is true that much of the scare factor of these data dossiers exists in the realm of hypotheticals, of an employer purchasing a list and discovering you have a history of anger management issues, or a health plan uncovering that you enjoy the occasional joint. But ultimately, as data brokers emphasize, the data is peddled in bulk lists, and isn’t about exposing individuals. 

Yet the idea of this data getting into the wrong hands isn’t far-fetched; it’s happened.

In October 2013, Krebs uncovered an enormous security breach at Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus and the Fort Knox of consumer information. A 24-year-old in Vietnam, Hieu Minh Ngo, pretended to be a private investigator from Singapore and tricked an Experian subsidiary into giving him direct access to information on 200 million Americans. The database, owned by the firm U.S. Info Search, included dates of birth, Social Security numbers, bank account information and addresses. According to his guilty plea last month, the identity thief then sold this access to more than 1,300 customers, and in an 18-month period, 3.1 million queries were made.

“At this point, the government does not know how many U.S. citizens’ [personally identifiable information] was compromised,” U.S. Attorney Arnold Huftalen told the court.

Experian declined a request for an on-camera interview, but wrote in a statement: 

The identity thief faces up to 45 years in prison, but as of yet, Experian has faced no penalties.

“That’s a recipe for disaster, when an organization that has almost no accountability collects some of the most sensitive and voluminous information on people,” Krebs said. “And when they have a security incident that jeopardizes the security of that information, there really aren’t any consequences.”

As criticism piles up, one data broker is making an attempt at transparency. In September, Acxiom launched the site Aboutthedata.com, which lets you see some of what the company knows about you, and gives you a chance to correct your data or opt out of collection.

More than half a million people have visited the portal, Acxiom’s CEO Scott Howe told AdWeek, and around 11 percent edited their information – primarily their political party, income and education. But while the company was bracing for double-digit opt-out rates, less than 2 percent asked to be removed. In fact, in the write-in comment spaces, Howe said most people were instead asking about how they can share more.