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The Little-Known Data Broker Industry Is Spending Big Bucks Lobbying Congress
Data brokers’ millions of dollars in lobbying spending in 2020 rivaled that of some Big Tech firms
The data brokers who’ve made fortunes from collecting and sharing millions of people’s personal information tend to fly under the radar. Names like LiveRamp or RELX might not be familiar to most Americans, but they’re making themselves known on Capitol Hill.
Collectively, data broker spending on lobbying in 2020 rivaled the spending of individual Big Tech firms like Facebook and Google. The Markup searched lobbying disclosures in the U.S. Senate’s Lobbying Disclosure Act database and the watchdog Center for Responsive Politics’ tool OpenSecrets for the names of companies that registered as data brokers in Vermont or California. Those states are the only two that require companies to annually disclose that they collect, sell, or share people’s personal information without having a direct relationship to them.
All in all, we found 25 companies whose combined spending on federal lobbying totaled $29 million in 2020. Many of the top spenders were not pure data brokers but companies that nonetheless have massive data operations. Oracle, which has spent the past decade acquiring companies that collect data, spent the most by far, with disclosure documents showing $9,570,000 spent on federal lobbying.
Privacy bill triggers lobbying surge by data brokers
Brokers say a potential privacy bill could hamper their work with law enforcement and overly restrict their industry. Data broker lobbying doesn’t get covered often because the companies aren’t well-known and they don’t spend much compared to Big Tech, but the industry as a whole can match what tech giants spend:
Congress has never been closer to passing a federal data privacy law — and the brokers that profit from information on billions of people are spending big to nudge the legislation in their favor.
Five prominent data brokers boosted their collective spending on lobbying by roughly 11 percent in the second quarter of this year compared with the same period a year ago, according to lobbying disclosure records reviewed by POLITICO. The $180,000 lobbying bump came as House Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise on a bipartisan bill aimed at giving consumers new powers to limit the collection and sharing of their data.
Privacy experts say the bill lets data brokers work with police, just not with the 3rd party data they’ve collected. A former DHS agent told me that getting data properly with a warrant can often take too long and that brokers are much faster.
RELX subsidiaries such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions and ThreatMetrix provide commercial services that could be considered part of an outsourced security state. This is generally bad. If at all, there must be strict rules, effective safeguards and much more democratic oversight.