Databases with private information in a legal sale

It is no secret that on the black market one can find almost any database with private information about citizens - postal addresses, telephone numbers, car numbers, etc. Did you think that this is a violation of the criminal code? It turns out, not always. On the cut is the price list of the American company Rapleaf , which conducts its activities quite legally. It collects information about users using cookies and creates a detailed profile for each individual user (with the name and surname). Then the database is sold to commercial customers (supposedly anonymous, without a name). The startup has already raised $ 15 million in venture financing.

Here are some prices per person, so you can roughly estimate how much information about each of us costs.

• person's name - not disclosed (but stored in the Rapleaf database)
• age, gender, place of residence - free
• marital status - $ 0.01
• the cost of the house is $ 0.01
• salary amount - $ 0.01
• car make - $ 0.01
• Education - $ 0.02
• availability of a smartphone - $ 0.03

According to experts , such databases still pose a threat to privacy, because from online identifiers (for example, an email address on Facebook) you can often calculate the real name of a person, so Rapleaf databases cannot be called anonymous in the full sense of the word.


^{Source: Rapleaf}