Your Personal Data Is About to Get Sold for $600

Your Personal Data Is About to Become Sold for $600

The "data enrichment" profiles of 203 million consumers are upwards for sale online, according to Steve Ragan at CSO Online. Whoever buys the files — the asking toll is but $600 — will be able to use the records for phishing scams, spamming, and maybe identity theft.

That loyalty card means everything he's buying goes into his consumer profile. Credit: BikeRiderLondon/Shutterstock

(Image credit: That loyalty bill of fare means everything he's buying goes into his consumer contour. Credit: BikeRiderLondon/Shutterstock)

Consumer information enrichment is what happens when you shop online or use a loyalty card at a retail concatenation. Your shopping habits are aggregated along with almost everything anyone would want to know about about you — your credit history, marital status, income, occupation, number of children, political persuasion and dozens of other "data points." Several different firms legally collect and analyze this data, then sell it to advertisers and marketers.

All of this information is part of the information being offered online by an unknown seller, Ragan said. Because the apparently stolen records as well include each person'south full proper name, street address and date of nascence, they could also be used for identity theft, even though Social Security numbers are not included.

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The seller claims the data is from Experian, but that company told Ragan that was false. It's possible the prepare instead came from Acxiom, a company that's not a household proper noun only which may have the largest repository of data on Americans in existence and has been chosen "the private NSA." Acxiom didn't respond to Ragan's queries.

It's likewise possible that the information was collected from several sources using diverse methods and is simply being packaged as part of a single data breach.

Experts who were office of the Peerlyst security-professional community took a look at a sample of the data provided by the seller and decided it looked genuine. Ragan called several telephone numbers included with the sample, but all went to voicemail.

If the information is real and your information is role of it, there'due south unfortunately not much that you tin do nigh information technology. You can move forward by treating unsolicited email messages with suspicion, past checking URLs of websites that you lot land on via shortened links and by installing and running antivirus software — in other words, all the things yous really ought to be doing already.

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Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom'south Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul commuter, lawmaking monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the data-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom'southward Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and even moderated a console discussion at the CEDIA domicile-technology conference. You can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.