Technology

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1412342/companies-make-it-hard-to-access-your-personal-data-under-state-privacy-laws-cr-finds-on

Nearly every time you buy something online or sign up for a loyalty program, you leave behind personal information that can be collected, shared, and sold among companies including advertisers, retailers, and data brokers. This kind of information is sometimes used to charge consumers more for a range of products and services, from groceries to insurance to mortgages, and to target them for financial fraud and identity theft.

A growing number of state privacy laws were designed to give consumers some control over that information, including the right to see what companies know about them. But a yearlong Consumer Reports investigation found that exercising those rights can often be extremely difficult—and that many companies and data brokers appear to be falling short of their legal obligations.

Over the past year, CR worked with 84 citizen volunteers to request their personal data from 169 companies they regularly interact with and 22 data brokers. The results were concerning: Roughly 25 percent of requests to companies failed to receive a response. Among data brokers, the failure rate was 34 percent, even though some of those brokers claim to maintain data on the vast majority of U.S. households.