How Data Brokers Sold My Identity: Madhumita Murgia (Transcript)

Full text of journalist Madhumita Murgia’s talk titled “How data brokers sold my identity” at TEDxExeter conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Madhumita Murgia – Journalist

I’m a 26-year-old British Asian woman working in media and living in a South West postcode in London. I have previously lived at two addresses in Sussex, and two others in North East London.

While growing up, my family lived in a detached house in Kent and took holidays to India every year. They mostly did their shopping online at Ocado, gave money to charities and read the Financial Times.

Now, I live in a recently converted flat with a private landlord, and I have a housemate. I’m interested in movies and startups, and I have taken five holidays in the past 12 months, mostly to visit friends abroad. I’m about to buy flights within 14 days.

My annual salary is between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds a year. I don’t own a TV or watch any scheduled programming, but I do enjoy on-demand services such as Netflix or Now TV.

Last week, I passed through Upper Street in North London on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 7 p.m. I cook a little, but I tend to eat out or get takeaways often. My favorite cuisines are Thai and Mexican food.

I don’t own any furniture, and I don’t have any children. On weeknights, I tend to spend the evenings with my university friends having dinner. I usually buy my groceries at Sainsbury’s but only because it’s on my way home.

I don’t care for cars or own one. I don’t like any form of housework, and I have a cleaner who lets herself in while I’m at work.

On Fridays, you’ll find me at the pub after work. At home, I’m far more likely to be browsing restaurant reviews rather than managing my finances or looking at property prices online.

I like the idea of living abroad someday. I prefer to work as a team than on my own. I’m ambitious, and it’s important to me that my family thinks I’m doing well. I’m rarely swayed by others’ views.

This motley set of characteristics, attitudes, thoughts, and desires come very close to defining me as a person. It is also a precise and accurate description of what a group of companies I had never heard of, personal data trackers, had learned about me.

My journey to uncover what data companies knew began in 2014, when I became curious about the murky world of data brokers, a multi-billion-pound industry of companies that collect, package, and sell detailed profiles of individuals based on their online and offline behaviors.

I decided to write about it for Wired Magazine. What I found out shocked me, and reinforced my anxieties about a profit-led system designed to log behaviors every time we interact with the connected world.

I already knew about my daily records being collected by services such as Google Maps, Search, Facebook, or contactless credit card transactions.

But you combine that with public information such as land registry, council tax, or voter records, along with my shopping habits and real-time health and location information, and these benign data sets begin to reveal a lot, such as whether you’re optimistic, political, ambitious, or a risk-taker.

Even as you’re listening to me, you may be sedentary, but your smartphone can reveal your exact location, and even your posture. Your life is being converted into such a data package to be sold on. Ultimately, you are the product.

Ostensibly, we’re all protected by data protection laws. In the UK, the law states that any personal data set has to be stripped of identifiers such as your name or your National Insurance number.

Personal data is considered anything that can be traced directly back to you without the need for additional information. This doesn’t mean it can’t be sold on. It only means that they need your permission.