Initial Thoughts On The FTC Report, "Data Brokers: A Call For Transparency And Accountability"

In a 110 page report issued yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission suggested that data brokers operate without transparency and asked Congress to consider enacting legislation to make data broker practices more visible to consumers and to give consumers greater control over personal information that is collected and shared by data brokers.

The report, "Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability" is the result of a study of nine data brokers undertaken by the FTC to shed light on the data broker industry. The report found that data brokers collect and store billions of data elements covering nearly every U.S. consumer. Just one of the data brokers studied holds information on more than 1.4 billion consumer transactions and 700 billion data elements and another adds more than 3 billion new data points to its database each month. Among the report's other findings: