Acxiom Corp: Some are saying it’s the The ‘faceless organization that knows everything about you’
When you think of the surveillance state, what comes to mind is usually government agencies like the FBI, IRS, DEA, NSA, or TSA, . But there’s a company you’ve probably never heard of that “peers deeper into American life,” and probably knows more about you than any of those groups: Little Rock–based Acxiom Corp. Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy has dubbed Acxiom “Big Brother in Arkansas,” while Gizmodo‘s Jamie Condliffe dubbed it the “faceless organization that knows everything about you.”
A brief Outline of Who the Company is and What it Does:
What is Acxiom Corp., and what does it do?
It is a database marketing company, which means it’s prime directive is to gather information and well… make a profit from it. It started in 1969, when most private information was not as readily available, as an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other similar databases as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Now, 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the U.S., and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year. “In essence, it’s as if the ore of our data-driven lives were being mined, refined, and sold to the highest bidder, usually without our knowledge,” says The Times‘ Singer.
What kind of data does it have?
Singer explains “If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.” It does more than collect that information, though. It uses it to pigeonhole people into one of 70 very specific socioeconomic clusters in an attempt to predict how they’ll act, what they’ll buy, and how companies can persuade them to buy their products. It gathers its data trove from public records, surveys you’ve filled out, your online behavior, and other disparate sources of information, then sells it to banks, retailers, and other buyers.”
Do other companies do this, too?
Yes, it’s a very lucrative business — Acxiom reported a $77.26 million profit last fiscal year, and it’s the No. 2 company in the business, after Epsilon. But analysts say that Acxiom has the world’s largest database on consumers.
Is this legal?
Yes, but the Federal Trade Commission is asking Congress to step in to make the data-marketing industry more transparent.
How sketchy is this?
“If you’re worried about Google or Facebook tracking you online, or holes in your iPhone security, this is much worse,” warns Gizmodo‘s Condliffe.” We sort of knew that commercial data-miners existed, but “Acxiom operates on a terrifying scale,” and it’s very likely that the company has an ever-growing dossier of 1,500 data points on you. The Times‘ “alarmist piece” about Acxiom conspiring to serve you “extremely accurate ads” would be more frightening, says Kashmir Hill at Forbes, if, on the same day, on the same page, the paper hadn’t run “an alarmist piece about how it’s impossible to know a person’s age online, and thus impossible to keep creepy old pedophiles from lurking on kids’ sites.” Well, which is it? The media is sending mixed message on the state of online privacy, and this is just one extreme example.”
In defence of Axicom… well, Axicom Explains this…..
