Data Broker
A company that buys, aggregates and resells personal data about individuals.
Data brokers combine records from public sources (property, court, voter files), commercial partners (loyalty programmes, warranty registrations) and online tracking to build profiles they sell to advertisers, insurers, employers and law enforcement.
Most people have never heard of the largest brokers yet appear in their databases. US state laws (California, Vermont, Texas) now require brokers to register and honour deletion requests; the EU relies on GDPR's right to erasure. Deletion is usually per-broker and has to be repeated as data is re-collected.
Related terms
The EU regulation that governs how organisations collect, store and process personal data.
California's data-privacy law giving residents rights over how businesses collect and sell their data.
The ability to control what information about you is collected, shared and inferred online.