ABC.NET.AU - May 31 - For just $60, a company registered in New York state is selling the data of ~2K Australian women who have signed up for online dating services. Dating sites often include the right to share or on-sell client data as part of the terms and conditions of starting an account. There are companies that are scraping people's data of all types. The companies that accumulate and combine this information are known as data brokers. The US Federal Trade Commission found that one data broker alone had 3K pieces of data on nearly every person in the U.S. Brokers would use data to classify people into certain categories that could be discriminatory, such as "elderly and gullible" and then selling their information to gambling marketers. Services like Paypal shares its user data with ~600 different third parties.
by Flint Duxfield & Scott Mitchell
See full article at ABC.net.au
