[Infowarrior] - Acxiom steps out of the shadows

[Richard Forno]

All you need to know – about yourself

By Emily Steel in New York

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e1c48f9a-a1c2-11e2-ad0c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Q6e7PBUQ

Acxiom is preparing to step out of the shadows. The consumer data broker, which tracks everything from a person’s estimated income to his political leanings, shopping patterns and exercise habits, is readying a service that will reveal to people what it knows about them.

New York-listed Acxiom, which has a market capitalisation of $1.4bn, collects details about more than 700m consumers across the globe and sells them to more than 7,000 clients.

The move to add a new level of transparency to its business practice comes amid mounting regulatory and governmental scrutiny of its multibillion-dollar industry, which include an investigation launched in December by the US Federal Trade Commission.

“We live in an era when transparency is important,” Tim Suther, Acxiom’s chief marketing and strategy officer, told the Financial Times. “We’re listening to that and trying to be even more transparent with people who are interested in understanding what companies like Acxiom do with information.”

Intimate details about people’s lives that are collected and analysed by companies like Acxiom are a gold mine in the digital age.

Companies are mining those robust dossiers to predict everything from what credit card offers to show prospective customers to whether a woman is pregnant and even when a person is likely to die. Marketers tap the data to tailor their advertising messages to individuals. Politicians use the data to calculate how they can most strongly influence people.

For years, the industry has operated behind a veil of secrecy and released few details about the exact information it tracked and how those details were used. Consumer privacy advocates long have demanded that data brokers such as Acxiom, Experian and Datalogix allow individuals to see what information is collected, correct those details and delete their profiles.

No current laws in the US require that data brokers maintain the privacy of individual’s data unless they are used for credit, employment, insurance, housing or other similar purposes.

“Consumers are often unaware of the existence of data brokers as well as the purposes for which they collect and use consumers’ data,” the FTC said in December. “This lack of transparency also means that even when data brokers offer consumers the ability to access their data, or provide other tools, many consumers do not know how to exercise this right.”

Acxiom sells three type of information products: marketing information, directory products based on contact information in published telephone directories and a fraud detection and prevention service. US consumers can access information about themselves in the fraud detection product for a fee of $5.

For its marketing information business, consumers now can visit Acxiom’s website to opt out of targeted ads based on Acxiom data but have no way to access the data collected.

Acxiom says the new service could be available sometime this year, but some technical and logistical hurdles remain. The company is attempting to secure the service so that individuals will not fall victim to identity theft from others accessing their data.

It also is sorting out a way to sort information so that it is available about individuals rather than the bulk data sets most companies seek. Acxiom also is figuring out how it can prevent people from deliberately falsifying information about themselves in the guise of ‘correcting’ the information.

Mr Suther said it is “not on the radar now” for consumers to be able to delete their profiles.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.

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