London — I’m 57, with a 30-year-old wife, a fairly new hot water boiler, an old-style TV, a petrol car and no kids. Actually, none of that is true, but it is what you might believe if you purchased access to my data from the world’s largest information broker by market value. The recent revelation that data miner Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed 50-million Facebook users’ personal data has heightened public concern about the way companies harvest and use our personal data. I asked Arkansas-based Acxiom Corporation, which earns more than $800m a year selling consumer profiles to the world’s largest companies, what data and insights it held on me. In Europe and the US, companies such as Acxiom are allowed to collect data about us from public and other sources. European privacy rules, which are due to be strengthened in coming months, require all data gatherers to disclose to any European who asks what information they hold on them. US law doesn’t give Americans the right to thi...
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