Once an entity has bought your data, there’s a bidding war. From the time you
click on a page to when the ads load on that page, potential advertisers use
automated tools to bid on how much they are willing to pay for you to see an ad,
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Amazon, for example, does not sell the data it collects. But it does allow third
parties who serve ads to install cookies, which they can use to gain information
about you, including your IP address and more. And Amazon does buy data
from data brokers, in what’s called “pseudonymized” form—your name is
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who have some portion of your data to match it to other bits, to create those
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WHAT ARE LAWMAKERS DOING ABOUT THIS?
Several recent major pieces of legislation have tackled the privacy problem, and
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Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies standards for keeping data
secure, a legal liability if companies fail, and required practices if a hack should
occur. It also gives citizens the right to access their personal data and to ask the
companies holding it to delete it.