Educational

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

Google announced on October 8 having discovered a vulnerability in the Google+ API which has been open since 2015. This vulnerability allowed third-party developers to access data for more than 500,000 users, including their usernames, email addresses, occupation, date of birth, profile photos, and

Facebook-owned Onavo VPN (adertised as a way to block harmful websites, and keep a user's data safe) is pulled from the Apple App Store due to tracking, collecting, and analysing customers' usage data, including from other unrelated apps. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/facebook-violates

30 million users had their accounts breached, with a total of 90 million accounts reset after Facebook's "view as" feature leaked unique user account access tokens, allowing attackers to not only trivially impersonate any other user on the platform, but also to potentially automate the attack on a

In March 2018, a security researcher discovered that the state-owned utility company Indane had access to the Aadhaar database via an API, but they did not secure this way of entry. As a result, anybody was able to use this service to access details on the Aadhaar database about any Aadhaar number

There has been the spread of the linking of the patient identity cards of HIV positive patients, pushed for by the National Aids Control Organisation. While it is not compulsory, in November 2017 it was reported that some patients reported that they were denied treatment until they gave their

In September 2018, a software patch was found by journalists to be widely available, that disabled or weakened the security features in the software used to enroll people on the Aadhaar databse, potentially from anywhere in the world. The patch was reportedly widely-available in WhatsApp groups

In December 2017, it was revealed that the large telco Bharti Airtel made use of Aadhaar-linked eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer) to open bank accounts for their customers without their knowledge or consent. eKYC is a way of using data in the UIDAI database as part of the verification process