Data Brokers and National Security
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2021
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A privacy and national security threat that goes under-discussed is data brokers, the secretive industry of companies buying, aggregating, selling, licensing and otherwise sharing consumer data. Justin Sherman is a fellow at Duke University's Technology Policy Lab, where he directs the project on data brokers. He also recently wrote a piece for Lawfare about data brokers advertising data on U.S. military personnel. Jacob Schulz sat down with Justin to talk about data brokers and the national security threat that they pose.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | Companies in banking and retail will buy data broker data to figure out information about |
| 0:42.0 | their current customer base as well as to conduct research on expansions of that customer |
| 0:48.2 | base. |
| 0:49.9 | That companies will buy data broker data to inform credit scores and transactions |
| 0:55.9 | and things of that nature. |
| 0:58.2 | Insurance companies are another big client for data brokers. |
| 1:01.3 | There's been great reporting demonstrating the ways in which health insurance companies |
| 1:07.1 | will buy tons of data broker data on individuals. |
| 1:12.2 | Income level, sexual orientation, health history, all this kind of stuff to try and algorithmically |
| 1:18.6 | predict how much they can charge them for health care. |
| 1:22.3 | It's really big in the insurance space. |
| 1:24.1 | There's lots of other smaller and medium sized companies, relatively speaking, that might |
| 1:29.9 | just buy data broker data to run advertisements towards particular customer segments. |
| 1:35.9 | The really is a wide use of data broker data in the private sector and tons and tons of |
| 1:40.4 | companies buy it. |
| 1:42.4 | This is part of why it's a multi-billion dollar industry. |
| 1:46.3 | Jacob Schultz and this is the Law Fair Podcast September 1st, 2021. |
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