Blog
Getting to Know You...
June 21, 2012
Acxiom Corp., the faceless, largely invisible data-mining company based outside of Little Rock, is getting renewed press attention this week.
It not only likely knows your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household worries and vacation dreams—it can also pigeonhole you into one of 70 very specific socioeconomic clusters to predict what you’ll do next.
In all, it has “an ever-growing dossier of 1,500 data points on you.”
In light of recent scandals with the de-anonymizing of personal info from Facebook apps, it is easy to worry how this information could be misused. We also wonder: Do all these data points add up to a pointillistic portrait of you that is realistic, or distorted?
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