What Happens When an Acquaintance Buys Your Data?: A New Privacy Harm in the Age of Data Brokers

Abstract

Privacy scholarship to date has failed to consider a new development in the commercial privacy landscape. Data brokers have begun to sell data products to individual consumers interested in tracking the activities of love interests, professional contacts, and other people of interest. This practice creates an avenue for a new type of privacy harm — “insider control” — which privacy scholarship has yet to recognize.U.S. privacy laws fail to protect consumers from the possibility of insider control. Apart from two noteworthy frameworks that might offer paths forward, none of the viable reforms offered by privacy scholars would meaningfully limit consumers’ vulnerability. This Note proposes changes to existing privacy doctrines in order to reduce consumers’ exposure to this new harm.