digital privacy
Data broker
A company that buys, aggregates, and resells personal data — location trails, purchases, profiles — usually without your knowledge.
A data broker is a company whose business is your information: it buys behavioral data from apps, websites, loyalty programs, and public records, aggregates it into profiles, and resells those profiles to advertisers, insurers, landlords, and law enforcement.
The industry operates almost invisibly — you have no relationship with the companies that know the most about you. Location data is the crown jewel: "anonymized" movement trails re-identify individuals trivially, since your home and workplace form a fingerprint. Laws like the GDPR and CCPA grant deletion rights; a dumbphone attacks the problem at the source by generating almost nothing to sell.
Related Terms
View all →Advertising ID
The resettable identifier every smartphone carries that lets apps and ad networks assemble your behavior into one profile.
Location tracking
The continuous recording of where your phone — and therefore you — goes, via GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell towers.
Metadata
Data about your communications — who, when, how long, from where — which reveals more than most people expect.