Examples of Abuse Timeline
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In September 2018, Acxiom introduced an open data framework intended to create an omnichannel view of the people in its database. The company claims this "unified data layer" will let customer companies connect their marketing technology and ad technology ecosystems and connect the online world to
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In April 2018, Facebook announced that in six months it would end a programme it called "Partner Categories", in which the social network acted as a bridge between data brokers like Acxiom, Epsilon, and TransUnion and the consumers their customers want to reach. In this deal, Facebook did not
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In 2017, a group of data brokers led by Acxiom, AppNexus, and MediaMath, and including Index Exchange, LiveIntent, OpenX, and Rocket Fuel, launched a consortium to make targeted programmatic advertising more widely available. Part of the consortium's goal is to enable the companies involved to
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In 2016, Acxiom announced a deal with the media delivery company Valassis, a subsidiary of Harland Clarke Holdings Corp, intended to provide marketers with better post-campaign analytics. The linkage of the two companies was intended to "provide an integrated view of a consumer's purchase behaviour"
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In 2014, Acxiom's chief product and engineering officer, Phil Mui, described the system the company had been building to link individuals' activities across the many channels, devices, and applications they use. A single individual may accumulate four different personas via 24 cookies across six
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In 2013, 44 years after Acxiom went into business selling consumer data, the company opened a website, aboutthedata.com, to allow Americans to see the data the company holds about them and make it easier to opt out of tracking. However, using the site requires visitors to input a substantial amount
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In December 2012, the US Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into data brokers' privacy practices, requesting information from nine companies: Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, Peekyou, Rapleaf, and Recorded Future. The FTC sought information about: the
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In 2012, Acxiom's database was reported to be the largest commercial database on consumers in the world, containing approximately 1,500 data points, or "elements", for each of the 500 million active consumers worldwide and processing more than 50 trillion data transactions per year. Each of the
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In 2004, the US Department of Justice investigated the theft of 8.2GB of personal data from File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers belonging to Acxiom between 2002 and 2003. The case was thought to represent the largest case of data theft at the time. Scott Levine, the owner of the email spamming
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In 2003, the for-profit privacy company Private Citizen, which helps paying consumers unsubscribe from telemarketers' lists and direct mailing offers, found that Acxiom had begun rejecting the batches of opt-out notices the service sent on behalf of its subscribers. Acxiom insisted that each person
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In 2003, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and PrivacyActivism filed complaints with the US Federal Trade Commission alleging that JetBlue Airways and Acxiom engaged in deceptive trade practices by supplying personal information about consumers to the Alabama
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In 2003, Acxiom announced that law enforcement officials had notified the company that it had been hacked, and that the attacker had intercepted information in transit between the company and some of its clients via a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server located outside the company's firewall. The