The Company That Quietly Knows Everything About You

Photo: Justin Bolle/The NY Times

You probably have never heard of Acxiom, but it has heard of you. Actually, not only has it heard of you, it knows all about you:

It knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.
It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.
Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.

Nathasha Singer tells us all about Acxiom in this enlightening New York Times article: Link

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Reminds me of the time I was fooling around on a computer in class, and I came across an American directory site where you could look up both the phone number and the age of people in America. I don't remember what site that was, and maybe it's for the better that I don't remember.