- The Trump administration wanted to prevent data corridors from selling information about US citizens
- The plan has been abandoned
- Data brokerage is a billionaire industry
The plan to prevent data corridors from selling personal and financial information generated by US citizens has been eliminated.
In the US, data corridors can harvest and sell confidential information about the country’s citizens, including names, addresses, social security numbers, navigation history data, purchasing history, location data and more. Regular buyers include advertisers and vendors, financial institutions, recruiters, government organizations and insurance companies.
At the end of 2024, the Office of Financial Protection of the Consumer (CFPB) announced plans to adjust the Law of Fair Credit Reports, a federal law that regulates how it is collected, used and shared credit information to the consumer. It was supposed to discuss data corridors in the same way as any other company, which should have forced them to comply with the privacy rules of the law.
Protect citizens
However, that rule was recently withdrawn, TechCrunch reported, citing a new list in the Federal Registry. Apparently, the interim director of the CFPB, Russell Vought, wrote that the rule “is not aligned with the current interpretation of the office” of the Law of Fair Credit Reports.
The CFPB wanted to prevent data corridors from selling data on US citizens who cite privacy, discrimination, lack of transparency and regulatory gaps. Supposedly, the objective was to protect consumers from the harmful or unfair use of their personal information. Techcrunch says that last year the FTC prohibited the “several data corridors” to collect and share data without people’s permission.
It is also worth mentioning that the data is the fuel for most cyber attacks these days. Confidential data are essential in phishing and phishing attacks, identity theft and, often, can be useful in gross forcing passwords. That is why the data brokerage industry is often the objective itself.
In recent years, there were multiple high profile cyber attacks against data and housing brokerage organizations, including the 2023 23Andme attack, the violation of national public data of 2024 and the Snowflake incident 2024.
Through Techcrunch
