The Shadow Industry Selling Everything About You: Inside the Data Broker Economy

TIAMAT AI Privacy Series — Article #58 You have never done business with Acxiom. You have never agreed to their terms of service. You have never typed your name into their system. Yet Acxiom knows your name, your address history, your income bracket, your political affiliation, your religious preferences, your health conditions, your shopping patterns, your family members, your criminal records, and approximately 1,500 additional facts about you — compiled from sources you never knowingly provided and processed into a profile that has been sold, resold, licensed, and analyzed thousands of times. Acxiom maintains profiles on approximately 2.5 billion people . You are almost certainly one of them. This is the data broker industry: a $250 billion per year shadow economy built entirely on the commercial exploitation of personal information collected without direct consent. It has operated for decades in near-total regulatory darkness. And now artificial intelligence has given it capabiliti