How your personal data sells cheaper than chewing gum

Your personal data -- be it your residential address, your phone number, email id, details of what you bought online, email ids, age, marital status, age, income and profession -- is all up for sale. Most of this personal data is sold for less than a rupee per person – the cost of a chewing gum. 

Over one month, ET approached companies called ‘data brokers’ – who hawk their services on online listings and sell personal information -- posing as a prospective buyer. For anywhere between Rs 10,000-15,000, we were offered personal data of upto 1 lakh people in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi.

 

source:google

The lists up for sale are creative and granular. One data broker we contacted said he could get lists of high net worth individuals, salaried people, credit card holders, car owners, retired women in any given vicinity. Some brokers sent us free samples: excel sheets with personal data of people in Bangalore, split by address and income profiles. ET called a dozen people from these lists to verify their details.

“It’s scary, to say the least,” said Hyderabad based Rajashekar, whose data like name, address and credit card ownership was procured from a Gurgaon-based data broker who sold ET a sample database of nearly 3,000 people who have Axis and HDFC credit cards. The price tag: Rs. 1,000.

The database had details like name, address, phone number and the classification of the card (debit, credit or a premium card). The broker also said that a database of 1.7 lakh people from Delhi, NCR and Bangalore can be made available for Rs 7,000.

 “Globally, data broking is an approximately $200 billion industry. Marketing products generate over 50% revenue, followed by risk mitigation which constitutes approximately 45% of the revenue, and finally people search constitutes the remainder,” says Kannan Sivasubramanian, VP of research firm Aranca.

“When you sign up for free discounts, fill out questionnaires, or your click stream in general, you are giving up all the data voluntarily and agreeing to privacy policies that allow you to do so,” said Mishi Choudhary, executive director of non-profit legal services organisation Software Freedom Law Centre.

The most obvious kind of misuse is that of financial data. The Reserve Bank of India registered 8,689 cases of frauds involving credit cards, ATM / debit cards and internet banking up till December 2016. This number was 16,468 in 2015-16. Many of these frauds are perpetrated by scamsters by using freely available personal data to win the confidence of customers to get them to share critical data like CVVs or One Time Passwords.

Data collected by agencies such US-based Equifax Credit Information Company, who carry out consumer credit reporting, is an example of data contributed by banks and other financial institutions.

 

                                                                   Kanjoos Tech