Sharon Priest is looking to buy or rent a new car - at least she is according to Acxiom Corp.
“That’s not true,” Priest said Wednesday. She also said the Little Rock company has the wrong age for her on its new website, aboutthedata.com. “They made me younger, so that’s OK.”
“I have always told people that Acxiom knows more about me than I know myself,” she said. “And now, I have to say that’s not necessarily true.”
Priest, executive director of the Downtown Little Rock Partnership, was one of many who visited Acxiom’s new website to see what the company knows about her.
Acxiom allowed public access to the website Wednesday to give consumers a look at some of the data it has gathered. Some users found that the site listed wrong or outdated information.
And rather than relieving concerns about how data are collected and used, some privacy and security experts say, the website leads users to feed Acxiom even more information.
Acxiom is a data broker that aggregates information about hundreds of thousands of people and then sells it to clients, such as banks and retailers, to use in marketing campaigns. The company extracts data from public records, its clients and from shopping habits.
On the aboutthedata.com site, Acxiom lists a specific user’s name, address and birth date, along with six categories of data: characteristic data, home data, vehicle data, economic data, shopping data and household interests data.
Within each category are other lists of slightly more detailed information. For example, under characteristic data the website might list a person’s ethnicity, determined on the basis of his last name. In the shopping data category, the website might list items, like fishing tackle, that a person purchased within the past year.
On Wednesday, the website said Tracy Robinson of Little Rock has two children and an annual household income of more than $125,000. In reality, Robinson, an administrative assistant for the state, said she has one child and earns about $85,000 less than Acxiom’s figure.
As much as 30 percent of the information in a person’s profile can be wrong at one time, Scott Howe, Acxiom’s president and chief executive officer, said Wednesday in a prepared statement.
Users have the ability to correct the information on the website.
“That’s because Acxiom collects data from a wide variety of sources, many of which are public records,which inherently have delays in being updated,” he said in the statement. “In the marketing industry, there is an understanding that data is constantly changing and being updated. Therefore, there is some level of acceptable variance in data accuracy at any given point in time.”
The introduction of Acxiom’s website comes as the company shifts its focus to online marketing.
As Acxiom has made the transition from bulk mail and email advertisements to more online and mobile platforms, it has received calls from critics to be more open about the data used.
While Acxiom’s new website is seen as part of the company’s effort to be more transparent, it has generated new concerns.
“This is kind of a ruse,” said Jeffery Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a Washington D.C.-based consumer privacy organization. “It’s supposed to provide you with information, but they are using the site” to connect a name and computer with the company’s data.
To access data on Acxiom’s website, users must give their full names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.
“As far as the website is concerned, no issue there,” said Brajendra Panda, a professor in the computer-science and computer-engineering department at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The concern is “how the data is protected.”
Panda said the website also puts a name to the data, making it easier for someone other than Acxiom to find out a lot more about a user.
The information Acxiom lists on its website is also not representative of the amount of data it collects about people, Chester said. Acxiom’s information about him was mostly correct, he said, except that he is married, and the company lists him as single.
“They are purposely being disingenuous,” Chester said. “They drastically simplify in order to evade the implications of the data.”
In response to questions about the website security, Howe said in a statement that verification is essential to the process.
“We went through extremely vigorous vulnerability testing regarding site security and authentication to ensure people could only access and modify their own information,” Howe said. “Security is a cornerstone for everything we do.”
Others who visited Acxiom’s website Wednesday said they weren’t troubled by the information they found because they expect some of their actions to be recorded.
“I just kind of assume when I’m shopping on the Internet or doing something [that] someone is watching,” said Joe Holmes, a spokesman for the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. Holmes said most of the information about him on the website is correct. “I just accept that as part of the new society.”
Priest, with the Downtown Little Rock Partnership, said she wasn’t concerned about what she found on the website because as a public figure she’s more visible online.
“I don’t see anything here that would freak me out,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything on this that you couldn’t go to Google and find about me.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/05/2013