With access to our whereabouts, web history, conversations, and the things we do, data brokers sell the personal intimate moments of our lives. They profit at the expense of our privacy and safety. Policies like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have done little to protect against the harms posed by the data broker industry. That’s because the dangers cannot be stopped through policy. The only way to keep everyone safe is to shut down the data broker industry. Tell policymakers to ban data brokers.

POLICY CANNOT PROTECT US FROM DATA BROKERS. WE NEED TO SHUT DOWN THE DATA BROKER INDUSTRY.

Data brokers scavenge sensitive personal information from our digital lives. From the websites we visit to the messages we post, we leave behind data trails everytime we interact with websites, apps, and our cell phones—or even when we walk by a camera on the street. The companies that own these products and applications collect, retain, and sometimes give this data to third parties like data brokers.  

Whether our information is shared, purchased, or scraped off the internet, data brokers compile and layer this data to create detailed pictures of our daily lives––including our location, health conditions, social security number, relationships, purchases and web browsing history. Data brokers specialize in layering data from different sources together, and are often able to de-anonymize sensitive personal data like health records and offer it for sale with our names attached. Then, without our knowledge or consent, they sell our detailed data profiles to anyone willing to pay.

In a 2022 investigation, Motherboard purchased the location data of visitors to 600 Planned Parenthood locations over the course of one week for $160. And a 2023 study revealed how easy it is for anyone, including foreign governments, to purchase personal information about active duty members of the military—even allowing the purchaser to target military members based on the military base where they were stationed.

Private individuals and companies are not the only ones purchasing information from data brokers. Government entities, including law enforcement, use data brokers to gain access to information that’d otherwise require a warrant. This blatant subversion of the Fourth Amendment leaves everyone vulnerable to government monitoring and tracking, all taking place without any judicial or rights-protecting oversight. This could lead to criminalization, arrest, and other harmful actions.

The potential negative impact on peoples’ lives is incalculable. Identify theft, cybercrime, intimate partner violence, and criminalization––the life altering, and in some cases life ending, consequences of this harmful, exploitative industry cannot be stopped with policy.

In recent years, policymakers around the world have tried to do something to protect against the harms caused by data brokers. The Federal Trade Commission has taken enforcement action to crackdown on data brokers and the business model of profiting from sensitive data, allowing the agency to articulate the dangers data brokers pose to consumers and demonstrating its willingness to take action to stop them. And laws, like the GDPR, regulate the data broker industry, even offering ways for people to request data brokers to delete their information. Despite these efforts, the data broker industry continues to put lives at risk.

Fundamentally, the exploitation of data for profit is inherently destructive. That cannot be fixed with regulation because the issue at hand is not a loophole or regulatory gap, the issue is the business model itself. In instances where the dangers of an industry surpass the ability of policies to protect against those dangers, the only way to truly protect people is to ban the industry. Whether it's nuclear weapons or stalkerware, policymakers have enacted such bans before.

Most efforts to regulate data brokers are a waste of time and resources—while we’re caught in a game of regulatory whack-a-mole, this extractive business model is doing real harm to countless people. We need to mobilize to protect ourselves and those we love by demanding policymakers ban data brokers now.