Recently, a company named Acxiom made a splash announcing the disclosure of the marketing data it has gathered on us - www.aboutthedata.com.
Hs anyone tried this?
Any thoughts or reservations about them, the questions they ask or the data they have gathered?
Let me get this straight-if I want to find out what companies know about me, I have to give this company(that I’ve never heard of before today) my full name, my phone number, my full address, my email address, my birthdate and the last four of my SSN?
Yeah, my reaction too…
Yes, isn’t that sweet? They want to show us that they only have about as much info as WhitePages.com, PeopleFinder.com etc.
Nothing to see there, folks, move along.
Take a look at their main web site some time. Almost content-free. Now that’s chilling.
There isn’t room on this board for me to list my “reservations” about Acxiom.
Either I’m really sneaky or they’re not revealing anything. I didn’t learn anything about myself except that I am male and I’ve made charitable donations in the past. What a waste of time.
I find it highly significant that after decades of being almost faceless and monolithic - basically, if you weren’t a client of sufficient size and budget to use their services, you weren’t worth even acknowledging, hence their nearly empty web site - they are suddenly moved to show everyone an essentially useless micro-subset of the data they hold.
What COULD have scared them, now? The fact that people are starting to catch on that the Acxioms of the world hold troves of data that governments can only dream about… and answer to no one but their owners and shareholders?
Oh, come on! That information is much less personal than what websites I’ve visited recently! :rolleyes:
I might, might have given them my real name from a cookie-free web browser account. But that much info? Seriously? I’m reluctant to give all that to companies I actually do business with.
They aren’t scared. They are wanting to link information they have on BigT Lastname with the information they have on “guy who lives on Hickville street.” It’s social engineering at its finest.
Ha, they’ve got nothing on me, nothing at all. Then again I did use my fake name I’ve been putting on stuff the last few years, along with my fake address and phone number. I really do feel sorry for the people who now live at the address I lived at 8 years ago. 
They already have that information. Acxiom isn’t Target or Amazon or even Facebook or Google - they have been collecting data, both passively and through active efforts, and collating that data, for decades. It’s what they do.
I suspect that if any one of us were given open access to their own records, they wouldn’t be able to add much information to it. Of any kind.