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Data brokers: the middlemen running the markets

data-brokers

Over the past 5 years, major digital technology stakeholders have boosted the data broker business. These middlemen collect and combine masses of traces that consumers leave online. They then offer them to the companies of their choice in exchange for income. Above all, they use this capital to manipulate markets around the world. These new powerful stakeholders are greatly misunderstood.

Patrick Waelbroeck, an economist at Télécom Paris, studies this phenomenon in the context of the Chair he cofounded dedicated to Values and Policies of Personal Information.