DATA BROKERS – THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

In the past few years we have seen the emergence of internet based “data brokers” who will sell information about a person without any restrictions. These sites can readily be found on the internet and they offer records for fees ranging from $20 to $50. No restrictions are placed on the access of data. In other words, anyone can purchase data about an individual and use it for any purpose.

Traditional “data brokers”, have been providing access to public records for many years, and these traditional brokers have restrictions on the use and access of their data repositories. The restrictions of these traditional data brokers are twofold – compliance with federal and state laws on information access and use, and contractual restrictions on the use of data.

Among these restrictions are FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act), DPPA (Drivers Privacy and Protection Act), and the Federal Privacy Act of 1973, among others. In order for KnightsBridge Castle to obtain access to information provided by traditional information brokers the firm was “vetted”. KnightsBridge Castle completed a complex series of applications and our executives were interviewed by two of the largest firms. In addition our procedures and physical facilities were inspected prior to granting access to data. Further as policy, KnightsBridge Castle obtains “permissive use” from its clients prior to initiating a search.

Contractual restrictions require us to be engaged in a specific type of business such as fraud prevention, and the contracts forbid accessing data for such purposes as running a “dating service”.

When KnightsBridge Castle accesses these traditional brokers’ services, we must reaffirm our use of data as a business engaged in the “prevention of fraud, or the detection of fraud.” Further we must attest that we are seeking this information as part of the normal course of our business. The information provided by traditional brokers, while it sometimes contains errors, is reasonably comprehensive and very useful in fraud detection.

We recently ran a test to compare “traditional brokers” with the new unrestricted internet information sources. The comparisons were not surprising. Traditional brokers provided comprehensive 50 state resources and provided advanced search facilities needed in fraud prevention and risk reduction. The internet brokers had no records on several of our test subjects, and revealed very limited data on others. Most of the data provided by the new internet brokers was readily available from Yahoo or Google searches. Some of the data was obtained from public records such as property records.
At KnightsBridge Castle we do not use these new internet data brokers because they both fail to comply with the law and they add little to our identity theft management efforts. For now, these internet brokers, provide not only bad value for money, but may well be in violation of many provisions of federal and state law.