data broker

E-commerce companies make particular use of customer information to personalize their offerings and optimally replicate customer needs. The data required for this is often purchased from data brokers.

The business model of data brokers is based on collecting as much information about consumers as possible, processing it analytically (creating customer profiles or customer clusters) and selling it on to companies. Data brokers collect customer data from a wide variety of offline and online sources. These can be publicly accessible databases such as telephone directories, but also non-public ones such as information from credit card companies or customer card programs.

One easy way to obtain customer data is through sweepstakes, where entry information is used. Buyer behavior on the Internet and the disclosure of personal data such as on social networks is an intensively used source for data brokers to obtain customer information. Some data brokers often operate on the edge of illegality in their data procurement and do not comply with data protection regulations.