@inproceedings{dipersio-2024-selling,
    title = "Selling Personal Information: Data Brokers and the Limits of {US} Regulation",
    author = "DiPersio, Denise",
    editor = "Siegert, Ingo  and
      Choukri, Khalid",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies @ LREC-COLING 2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.legal-1.7",
    pages = "39--46",
    abstract = "A principal pillar of the US Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights is data privacy, specifically, that individuals should be protected from abusive practices by data collectors and data aggregators, and that users should have control over how their personal information is collected and used. An area that spotlights the need for such protections is found in the common practices of data brokers who scrape, purchase, process and reassemble personal information in bulk and sell it for a variety of downstream uses. Such activities almost always occur in the absence of users{'} knowledge or meaningful consent, yet they are legal under US law. This paper examines how data brokers operate, provides some examples of recent US regulatory actions taken against them, summarizes federal efforts to redress data broker practices and concludes that as long as there continues to be no comprehensive federal data protection and privacy scheme, efforts to control such behavior will have only a limited effect. This paper also addresses the limits of informed consent on the use of personal information in language resources and suggests a solution in an holistic approach to data protection and privacy across the data/development life cycle.",
}

A principal pillar of the US Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights is data privacy, specifically, that individuals should be protected from abusive practices by data collectors and data aggregators, and that users should have control over how their personal information is collected and used. An area that spotlights the need for such protections is found in the common practices of data brokers who scrape, purchase, process and reassemble personal information in bulk and sell it for a variety of downstream uses. Such activities almost always occur in the absence of users{'} knowledge or meaningful consent, yet they are legal under US law. This paper examines how data brokers operate, provides some examples of recent US regulatory actions taken against them, summarizes federal efforts to redress data broker practices and concludes that as long as there continues to be no comprehensive federal data protection and privacy scheme, efforts to control such behavior will have only a limited effect. This paper also addresses the limits of informed consent on the use of personal information in language resources and suggests a solution in an holistic approach to data protection and privacy across the data/development life cycle.
DiPersio, Denise
Selling Personal Information: Data Brokers and the Limits of US Regulation