- The main story is about computers and how they monitor our activities.
- The focus is on data brokers, companies that collect personal information and sell or share it with others.
- Data brokers operate in an unregulated industry and can gather a lot of information about individuals.
- They use cookies and trackers to track users' online activities.
- Data brokers create profiles of individuals and categorize them into different groups for targeted marketing.
- Some data brokers sell lists of people with specific ailments or personal information.
- The industry is not always ethical, as some data brokers have been involved in scams and fraud.
- The summary highlights the need for more regulation and protection of personal data.

- Data brokers can collect and sell your location data without your knowledge or consent
- Life 360, an app for families to track each other, sold location data to brokers who then sold it to marketers
- De-identifying data does not guarantee anonymity, as it can still be easily re-identified
- Lack of regulation allows government agencies to purchase data without warrants or oversight
- Muslim Pro app sold user location data to a broker supplying information to the US government
- Personal steps to protect privacy include using web browsers and disabling tracking on iPhones
- Legal fixes, such as a comprehensive federal privacy law, are needed to regulate data brokers.

- Data brokers spend a lot of money on lobbying, making it difficult to regulate them.
- Politicians rely on data obtained from brokers for their campaigns.
- Congress has acted quickly to safeguard privacy in the past when their own privacy was at risk.
- There are legal ways to obtain personal information from data brokers.
- The video creators targeted a specific demographic group near the U.S. Capitol with ads to collect data.
- They received clicks on the ads, potentially identifying individuals and their location.
- The legality of this practice is questionable.
- Legislators should take action to prevent misuse of personal information.

- The text discusses data brokers, companies that collect and sell personal information.
- Data brokers use cookies and trackers to monitor online activities and create profiles for targeted marketing.
- Some data brokers have engaged in unethical practices, including selling personal information and being involved in scams.
- The lack of regulation allows government agencies to purchase data without oversight.
- Personal steps can be taken to protect privacy, such as using web browsers and disabling tracking on iPhones.
- Legal fixes, like a comprehensive federal privacy law, are needed to regulate data brokers.
- Politicians rely on data obtained from brokers for their campaigns.
- There are legal ways to obtain personal information from data brokers, but the legality of certain practices is questionable.
- Legislators should take action to prevent misuse of personal information.

John Oliver discusses how much data brokers know about us, what they’re doing with our personal information, and one….unusual way to change privacy laws.

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Our main story tonight concerns computers.

There's 1 in my house, 1 in my pocket, and 1 on my wrist.

And fun fact, if they all broke at the same time, I'd die!

-♪ ♪ -More specifically, we're gonna talk about the fact that we've all had unsettling moments when it became clear that our computer was monitoring our activities a little more closely than we might like.

After financial planner Rod Lorenz opened a new office, he used a credit card to buy baby wipes to clean the place.

He says after picking up just 1 canister, he was shocked to be bombarded with targeted online ads for other baby wipes and more children's products.

Something this single guy around town says he's definitely not interested in, at least not now.

Poor Rod got roped into the modern update of Hemingway's classic story, For Sale, Baby Shoes, Click Here.

And look, of course Rod didn't want that shit.

He was only interested in 3 things, getting laid, getting paid, and rocking the hell out of some wraparound shades.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ But we have all found ourselves being targeted by ads for something oddly specific and thought, how on earth did they know to show me that?

And tonight, We're gonna talk about who makes that possible.

It's a multi-billion dollar industry encompassing everyone from credit reporting companies to these weird people-finding websites that pop up whenever you Google the name of your friend's sketchy new boyfriend, to these names that you may never have heard of.

But what all these companies have in common is, they collect your personal information and then resell or share it with others.

As 1 expert puts it, they're the middlemen of surveillance capitalism.

Which sounds like both a horrific profession and also a B-plus Jake Gyllenhaal thriller.

He's not a spy and he's not a civilian, he's the middle man.

And look, I know It is not news that you get tracked online.

Adults say that they don't think it is possible to go through daily life without having data collected about them by companies or the government, making 4 out of 10 U.S.

But this, This isn't just about the convenience and or irritation of targeted ads.

Data brokers operate in a sprawling, unregulated ecosystem which can get very creepy, very fast.

Retailer OfficeMax knew not only that Mike Say's daughter was dead, but how she died.

It says, Mike Say, daughter killed in car crash.

Or current business, and this is my home.

Why would they have that kind of information?

Right, and obviously, that is completely appalling, But I will say, it is not that surprising to me that OfficeMax was behind that, as they're clearly not entirely on top of their shit.

If you Google OfficeMax right now, the people also asked questions include, and this is true, is OfficeMax the same as Office Depot?

--AUDIENCE LAUGHS-- The truth is, when it comes to data brokers, they know significantly more about you than you might like, and do significantly more with it than you might think.

So tonight, let's talk about the whole industry.

And let's start with how your information is collected.

Basically, every time you interact with society, you are leaving little breadcrumbs that can be gathered together and sold.

And much of this happens online, thanks in large part to cookies.

Cookies were developed in the early days of the Internet, and they're actually 1 of the things that make it slightly better.

A distinction that they share with Henry Winkler's Twitter feed and literally nothing else.

What they essentially do is enable websites to remember you.

They are why Amazon remembers that you put a $106 complete box set of The Mentalist in your cart after eating an unexpectedly strong weed gummy, even if you don't.

And if that's all cookies did, it'd honestly be fine.

But the practice gradually evolved to include third-party cookies.

Basically, companies other than the site that you are on, planting a piece of code in your browser that allows them to track where else you are going on the Internet.

Just watch as a tech writer explains what they found when they tried to learn just how many companies were tracking them.

started the day on Google and did a search, and 9 trackers were downloaded onto my computer.

Trackers do what it sounds like they do, they track you.

They can get my IP address, or the device I'm using, or the screen size.

They were able to determine my location very precisely.

And they're just, the trackers are just kind of, you know, on my heels as I go around the web.

Yeah, and I don't know about you, but I don't want a whole crowd of strangers watching what I search for on the internet.

Not because it's gross, because it's private.

There's nothing gross about looking up, let's say, are there any shower heads with a contains pulp option.

The option to have some pulp in the shower.

It's a normal shower most of the time, but occasionally, I'll have the option to get pelted with something that's got some heft to it.

Something to wake me up and keep me on my toes.

Sometimes I need it, don't claim that you don't.

We'd all love to pretend that the sun only rises in peacetime, but things being what they are, we find ourselves again at war.

So yeah, start my day and rock me with some juicy bits, that's what I want.

And I don't want anyone watching me when I search to see how close we are to that particular technology existing, because it is private.

But data brokers often take all the breadcrumbs that they have gathered about you, pair them with other data they can obtain, and then share all of it with businesses who want to market to you.

Here is how Epsilon, 1 of the biggest data broker firms, positions itself.

They all look and act different, but people are fundamentally the same.

They all want respect, protection, and an easier time getting the things they need from brands.

It's all in Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs.

People want their physiological needs met, their safety accounted for, and their search history handed over directly to the Aflac duck.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Epsilon's ad even goes on to show how that particular service of theirs works, demonstrating how they can create a client ID for someone that contains everything they know about them, like the fact they're a vegan, and that they make $45,000 to $50,000 a year, or that they are a 41-year-old male who is married, with kids at home, and is Googling snow globe stuck in butt, what to do, question mark.

And once companies like Epsilon collect enough information about you, they can sort you into groups.

Data broker firms sell access to lists with names like Couples with Clout, Ambitious Singles, Boomers and Boomerangs, Potlucks and The Great Outdoors, Golf Carts and Gourmets, and Kids and Cabernet.

Those are all both real names of groups compiled by a data broker, and, as of now, immediately greenlit shows on TLC.

--LAUGHTER --And look, you might not care if a company wants to toss your data in a group called Kids and Cabernet so marketers can more effectively sell you things that make you seem like a bad mom in a fun way.

Because some companies can and do draw up even more narrowly targeted lists, like people with certain ailments or sexual preferences, and then sell those lists to anyone who wants to buy them.

And what they can buy is pretty troubling.

WRAL bought thousands of names and addresses of local people with serious illnesses.

This group living in the 27607 Zip Code have diabetes.

These residents of 27609 have high blood pressure.

And all of these locals battle depression.

So we brought this data and it tells us you're pregnant.

I honestly did not think there could be a worse thing to ask a woman you don't know than, are you pregnant?

But, you are pregnant, wanna know who I paid to find out, has certainly entered the chat.

And if you're thinking, but that's illegal under HIPAA, right?

As 1 researcher pointed out, the medical information that you relay to your physician is highly protected, but if you go to a medical website and search for terms like HIV or abortion, that information is not protected at all.

It's a system that seems ripe for abuse before you learn that some data brokers have offered lists such as suffering seniors, payday loan central Hispanic, or even, help needed, I am 90 days behind on bills.

And some in this industry will insist that they would never put people at risk by selling their data.

The company that collects clouds of information about you?

In 2014, their then CEO even went on 60 Minutes to reassure people that his business in particular operated in a completely above board manner.

If there are abuses out there, We don't believe those happen within our company, and we would be the first to raise our hand.

You would be the first to raise your hand, would you?

That is interesting, especially because last year, Epsilon settled with the DOJ for $150 million for facilitating elder fraud schemes, after admitting that it sold more than 30 million consumers' data to clients who employees knew were carrying out scams.

And they were doing it for nearly a decade.

So I guess that that guy really should have been doing that entire interview with his fucking hand in the air.

And at this point, you may be thinking, okay, I think I get it.

There is nothing more that you need to tell me.

What about the fact that apps on your phone can give away your exact location to third parties, sometimes without you even knowing it.

This free flashlight app settles with the FTC for doing just that, and they are not alone.

Take Life 360, an app giving families the opportunity to keep track of 1 another.

You may have seen their ads featuring parents looking relieved because they can see where their kids are going and know when they have safely reached their destination.

In a report from the website, The Markup says that Life 360 sells its location data to about a dozen different brokers, who then sell it to marketers.

Yeah, it turns out they were selling location data to around 12 different brokers.

It's like those old commercials, it's 10 o'clock, do you know where your children are?

-♪ AUDIENCE LAUGHS And I have to tell you, Life 360 insists that they are no longer doing that, and that anyway, they had de-identified their users' data before selling it.

That last claim is actually very common among both data brokers and the companies that they work with.

Because while it sounds reassuring, the truth is, it can be incredibly easy to find out who is behind a number or a code.

1 team of researchers even found that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any data set using just 15 demographic attributes, among them age, gender, and marital status.

And the ease of de-anonymizing data is something that we have actually known about for years.

In 2006, AOL turned over a bunch of these anonymized search records of their users to the public.

And it only took a few short hours for a reporter to decode who user number 4417749 was.

Between searches for things like numb fingers, 60 single men, and dog that urinates on everything, the reporter uncovered a woman named Thelma Arnold.

Okay, I am not saying that it is at all pleasant that that happened, but for the record, I am glad that it introduced me to Thelma Arnold, because I love that woman.

She hasn't given up, Despite her numb fingers, lackluster love life, and utterly broken dog, none of that is stopping her from shooting her shot and looking for single men in her area.

We stan a middle-aged queen with stamina.

As we looked into this story, we constantly got reminders that none of us are really anonymous online.

At 1 point, a researcher clicked on this company's website, didn't do anything else, just went there on his browser, and later that day, got this email saying that they knew he visited and that, We offer a pretty cool service called Website Visitor Identification, which helps brands identify who's browsing their website.

In fact, it's how we knew how to send you this quick email.

I don't want anyone tracking what my staff members are doing online, mainly because I don't want to know how many of them have looked up, what is John Oliver like?

And it is not like data brokers are super careful about who gets your sensitive information.

You have already seen a local news station ambush a pregnant woman.

And a few years ago, CBS bought some location data from brokers, and it did not take much for them to find out whose it was, where they lived, and what they were doing.

No names or phone numbers were tied to the data, but it was easy to figure out who each phone belongs to, based on where they spend their nights here in Greenwich.

1 phone pinged in the morning inside a 7000000 dollar mansion.

The person then visited a country club before heading downtown and returning home.

Although, I will say that particular example is not that surprising to me.

If you told me an individual woke up in a 7000000 dollar mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut and made me guess where they went next, I'd have gone with, I don't know, a country club, -...

Downtown to hunt humans for sport, and then home again.

And I'd have been pretty sure that I was right.

And the thing is, that kind of identifying information can cause huge problems.

Just last year, a priest was forced to resign after a Catholic newsletter said it used app data signals from Grindr to monitor his activity and matching his phone to his residence.

Essentially, outing him, which is a massive, harmful invasion of privacy and definitely the worst scandal ever to hit the Catholic Church.

Also, just quick side note here, Catholic Church, are you absolutely sure that Jesus was homophobic?

He had mutually respectful friendships with women, a distant relationship with his father, and when he found out he was gonna be betrayed, He invited everyone to a confrontational dinner.

I'm just saying it might be worth re-examining your thesis there.

And look, you might still think, I don't care about this, my life is an open book, I have no secrets, so data brokers can just have at it.

Even if that is true for you, though, consider that there are others out there who might have very good reasons to not want to be found.

1 of her addresses came up on a data broker's site.

If you have someone that's tried to kill you, for them to be able to just type in your name and any known address that you've ever stayed in can pop up, it's scary because now they know ways to start trying to find you.

And that's not just theoretical, it has happened.

In New Hampshire, a stalker killed a former classmate after finding her with information that he bought from a data broker for $45.

And if you have a stalker, or you're a victim of domestic violence, it is understandable to want your information removed from these people search sites.

Unfortunately, each has its own specific and sometimes very complex process of requesting the removal of information.

And there is no federal law requiring that they honor an opt-out request at all.

And the lack of regulation here doesn't just benefit individuals who might mean you harm.

Because it gives them a very attractive loophole to the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Because under that, the government typically needs a warrant to collect information about you without your consent.

But, if it is not forcing someone to turn over your data, if it's simply buying it from a data broker, that is apparently fine, no warrant necessary.

And you can see how valuable that would be to them.

In fact, federal agencies from the FBI to ICE have purchased data without warrants, public disclosures, or robust oversight to carry out everything from criminal investigations to deportations.

And the thing is, you might not know if your information has been supplied to the government by an app.

Even the company behind the app might not know, because it might sell your info to a broker, which then resells it to someone else, which then supplies it to the government.

A couple of years back, VICE found that the app Muslim Pro, which lets Muslims know when to pray, had been selling user location data to a broker that supplied information to the U.S.

And while because the chain is so opaque, it is hard to know what exactly was sold or what the government did with it, the app's users were understandably pretty alarmed.

Feeling disturbed, appalled, but not surprised.

That app has since reportedly severed ties with its data partners.

You know, my conversation with God is not information the government needs.

Yeah, of course it's not information the government needs.

There is a reason the book wasn't called Are You There, God?

And Homeland Security's on the line as well.

So To recap here, we've got shady data brokers with virtually no oversight, collecting your data and building profiles that can track who you are, where you are, and what you are most likely to do or buy.

You cannot edit this dossier, and others from cops to reporters to your own abusers can find and use this information.

Well, it is a bit tricky, especially given the fact that the entire economy of the Internet right now is basically built on this practice.

All the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product.

But experts say that there are actually some small steps that you can personally take.

You can use web browsers like these to help better protect you against third-party tracking.

And if you have an iPhone, you can go to the privacy menu, hit the tracking button, and turn off Allow Apps to Request to Track.

But this should not be your responsibility.

Your privacy should be the default setting here.

The EU passed a law to force sites to disclose cookies and allow you to opt out.

But, I will say, companies now often cleverly present those options in the most annoying way possible with, accept all cookies and easy default, but if you want to reject them, forcing you to go through multiple confusing steps for no clear reason, which is very smart, to be honest.

No 1 is gonna put in the work to reject cookies just to sneak a peek at an article titled, 5 Times Andrew Garfield Just Was.

You'd much rather just hit accept and enjoy your remaining time on this Earth gazing at the most emotionally connected Spider-Man to ever splooge the ooze.

Now, As for here in the U.S., individual states have tried to limit data brokers, but advocates say that what is really needed is a comprehensive federal privacy law governing them.

This has been proposed for years now, but nothing has happened for a couple of key reasons.

First, data broker spending on lobbying in 2020 rivaled that of Facebook and Google.

But also, politicians now famously build their campaigns on data obtained from brokers.

Both parties regularly boast about how much they use data.

In fact, just listen to former RNC Chair Reince Priebus openly bragging about it.

Everything about almost every potential voter

in Georgia is known, and it's not even a joke.

They know what beer they drink, what car they drive, how many kids they have, and all that data is used to target every single voter in Georgia.

Politicians rely on data to be able to target our interests with pinpoint precision.

Although, therefore, I do wonder why no presidential candidate has yet targeted me personally with ads promising to fight for the shower of mourning chunks that I so richly deserve.

I Google it all the time, you would have my vote instantly.

But it is very frustrating that the people who could do something about data brokers are so actively incentivized not to.

But here is where we may actually be able to help.

Because, interestingly, the 1 time that Congress has acted quickly to safeguard people's privacy was in the 1980s when Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court and a reporter walked into a local video store and asked the manager whether he could have a peek at Bork's video rental history, and he got it.

As soon as Congress realized there was nothing stopping anyone from retrieving their video rental records too, they freaked the fuck out.

And lo and behold, the Video Privacy Protection Act was passed with quite deliberate speed.

So it seems when Congress' own privacy is at risk, they somehow find a way to act.

And it also seems like they're not entirely aware just how easy it is for anyone, and I do mean anyone, to get their personal information.

Because in researching this story, we realized there is any number of perfectly legal bits of fuckery that we could engage in.

We could, for example, use data brokers to go fishing for members of Congress by creating a demographic group consisting of men age 45 and up in a five-mile radius of the U.S.

Capitol who had previously visited sites regarding or searched for terms including divorce, massage, hair loss, and midlife crisis.

We could, we could call that group Congress and Cabernet and then target that list with ads that might attract those men to click, like, -"Marriage Shouldn't Be a Prison," or...

-"Can You Vote Twice?" We could also throw in, -"Do You Want to Read Ted Cruz's Erotic Fan Fiction?" -...just to see what would happen.

And If anyone clicked, we'd be able to harvest even more data from them, which we could then theoretically take steps to de-anonymize.

Now, am I saying that we're actually going to do that?

Collect all that raw information and store it in, let's say, a manila envelope somewhere?

Well, I am sorry to disappoint you, we are not going to do that.

Why would we when we have already done it?

And honestly, this whole exercise was fucking creepy.

We ran those 3 targeted ads this week in the Capitol Hill area.

And to give you a sense of just how many clicks we got, it was very much not 0.

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Data Brokers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)