The Shadowy List Dealers--Accurate and Lexis Nexis Underworld--June 2025.

The Shadowy List Dealers--Accurate and Lexis Nexis Underworld--June 2025.

Accurate and LexisNexis are the "shadow information controllers" of our time. Both companies hold the personal information of hundreds of millions of people and sell reconstructed profiles of them to advertisers, insurance companies, and government agencies. Information such as age, address, purchase history, and political interests are collected without the person's knowledge and used for evaluation. Accurate, in particular, has been behind the marketing industry, providing a mechanism for predicting personal preferences and consumption trends. LexisNexis, on the other hand, has built a database that combines public and criminal records and provides information to investigative agencies such as the FBI and ICE. In some cases, individuals' movements are tracked without court warrants, and criticism of privacy violations is persistent. The disadvantages caused by erroneous information and the difficulty of correcting it are also serious problems. Furthermore, as was the case i
n 2013 with the leak of information by an Accurate-related company, there is no guarantee of the security of the information held by the company. This huge information industry, which bypasses the net of consumer protection, is quietly creating a society in which we live without knowing "who we are being treated as.