Data Brokers. Home of Twisting Information and Social Profiling.

We have already covered the data broker industry — who they are, where they get their data, and who buys it. This post is different. This one is about you specifically. About what your profile actually looks like. About how it is used. And about the part of the data broker story that is most unsettling and least discussed: the fact that what these companies believe they know about you is often not what you have told them — it is what they have guessed.

Data brokers do not only collect facts. They generate inferences — predictions about your characteristics, behaviors, beliefs, and future actions derived from patterns in the data they hold. These inferences can be remarkably accurate. They can also be completely wrong. And the critical detail is that it largely does not matter which — because they are being used to make real decisions about your life either way.

A data broker profile is not a simple list of facts. It is a layered document that combines verified information, purchased data, publicly sourced records, and algorithmically generated inferences into a composite portrait of a person.

Acxiom — one of the largest data brokers, with profiles on roughly 2.5 billion people — attributes over 30,000 individual characteristics to each person in its database. These range from basic demographics to inferred psychological traits. Publicly available Acxiom data segment categories have included likelihood of getting vaccinated, estimated ethnicity, inferred political views, predicted health conditions based on purchase patterns, and financial stress indicators derived from spending behavior.

You did not tell Acxiom any of this. You did not fill out a form, take a survey, or submit an application. These characteristics were inferred — calculated from the combination of your location history, your purchase records, your browsing patterns, your public records, and the behavioral patterns of millions of other people who share similar characteristics.

The chief privacy officer of Acxiom — the person whose job is to manage privacy at one of the world’s largest data brokers — has publicly acknowledged that the inferences his company sells are not always correct. Speaking at an industry conference, he described them as “informed guesses” and expressed concern about inaccurate inferences being used for health and financial decisions rather than merely advertising.

Independent research has reached starker conclusions. A 2024 study found that advertising audiences built on data broker inferences were often “barely better than finding the right customers by random chance.” The same researcher noted that the quality of consumer profiles sold by many data brokers had shown no improvement over an eight-year period.

This creates a situation with no good outcome for the people being profiled. If the inferences are accurate, private aspects of your life — your health conditions, your financial stress, your political views, your relationship status — are being sold to entities who use them to make decisions about you. If the inferences are inaccurate, you are being affected by decisions made on the basis of a false portrait of who you are, with no opportunity to correct it and often no awareness that it exists.

The commercial applications of data broker profiles extend well beyond advertising. The decisions being made on the basis of these profiles affect access, opportunity, and the basic terms on which you participate in economic life.

Insurance pricing. Insurers use consumer data profiles — including inferred health indicators, lifestyle patterns, and financial behavior — to set premiums and determine eligibility. You may pay more for insurance because of data a broker inferred about your behavior, without knowing why, without being told what data was used, and without any opportunity to dispute it.

Credit decisions. Lenders use data broker profiles to supplement traditional credit assessments. Your estimated income, your inferred financial stability, your spending patterns — all derived from third-party data — can influence whether you are approved for credit and on what terms.

Employment screening. Background check companies — themselves a category of data broker — compile profiles used by employers to assess job candidates. These profiles draw on public records, social media data, and commercial databases. Errors in these profiles have resulted in people being denied employment for records that belong to someone else or that have been incorrectly attributed.

Targeted manipulation. In 2025, Mobilewalla — a data broker — was found to have created audience segments including pregnant women identified by their visits to pregnancy centers, and sold those segments to advertisers and other brokers. The women had not disclosed their pregnancies. They had been identified and categorized by their physical movements. That categorization was then sold and used to target them with messaging specifically chosen to influence their decisions during a vulnerable period.

Pricing discrimination. Retailers and service providers use consumer data profiles to offer different prices to different people for identical products or services. Your data profile — your inferred income, your purchase history, your perceived price sensitivity — influences what you are charged. Two people buying the same product at the same time may pay different prices based on what their profiles suggest they are willing to pay.

One of the most consequential aspects of data broker profiles is their invisibility. You cannot see your profile. You do not know what it says. You do not know which inferences have been made, which decisions have been influenced by it, or whether the information it contains is accurate.

In some US states with privacy legislation, you have the legal right to request your data from brokers and to ask for corrections. In practice, exercising these rights is cumbersome — each broker has its own opt-out process, requests must be resubmitted regularly as data is continuously re-acquired, and the burden falls entirely on the individual rather than the industry.

In most of the world, no equivalent rights exist. Your profile grows, is sold, is used, is resold, and influences decisions about your life — entirely outside your awareness and beyond your control.

Understanding this does not give you complete control over your profile. But it gives you something more valuable — an accurate picture of the environment you are operating in. And with that picture, you can make deliberate choices about the data you generate, the information you share, and the digital footprint you leave behind — knowing that each of those choices feeds, directly or indirectly, into a portrait of you that is being sold.