Cyber Coverage Report Highlights Knowledge Issues for Civil Rights, Nationwide Safety and Democracy
Duke’s Cyber Policy program released a report on US Individuals’ sensitive data used by data brokers. The report finds that data brokers openly and explicitly advertise sensitive information from US individuals – which threatens civil rights, national security, and democracy. Data brokerage is a virtually unregulated practice in the United States, the authors explain.
The report examined 10 major data brokers and the highly sensitive data they hold on US individuals. She notes that data brokers share demographic information, political preferences and beliefs, as well as the whereabouts and even real-time GPS locations of individuals, including current and former US military personnel and current US government employees.
The publication contains political implications for the United States – and recommendations to protect individuals and the country. Specifically, the report recommends that Congress embed the data broker ecosystem into a new, strong federal data protection law, give the FTC more powers to investigate unfair and exploitative data brokerage practices, and give the executive branch new export control agencies to restrict data brokers’ sales of U.S. data to certain people foreign actors.
Main findings of the report
- Justin Sherman, author of the report All 10 data brokers surveyed openly and explicitly advertise data on millions of US individuals, often with thousands or tens of thousands of sub-attributes on each of those individuals, ranging from demographic information to personal activities and life preferences (e.g., Politics, travel, banking, healthcare, consumer goods and services).
- People search websites collect public records of individuals and allow anyone to search for key activists, senior military officials, and others to uncover personal information.
- At least one data broker has a data partner who openly and explicitly promotes data about U.S. citizens’ interests in political organizations, personalities, and causes, including, but not limited to, data about those promoted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP .)), Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the National LGBTQ Task Force.
- Several of the data brokers examined openly and explicitly advertise data exchange platforms to which tens to thousands of companies contribute data about individuals.
- Several data brokers are promoting the ability to locate people, from using driver’s license records and other aggregated data to locating phone geospatial locations.
- Three major US data brokers in this report openly and explicitly advertise data on current or former US military personnel.
Cyber Policy Fellow Justin Sherman, who graduated from Duke in 202o, is the author of the report. As a Fellow, Sherman led data communications research for Duke’s Privacy & Democracy Project during his fellowship through Duke’s Technology Policy Lab.
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