Service Faces Backlash Over a Widespread Practice: Selling User Data - The New York Times

Disconcerting data dealings

"What Unroll.me does is far from an anomaly — it is part of an expansive and largely unregulated world of selling personal data collected by online consumer services. As long as a service like Unroll.me has a privacy policy, adheres to it and does not sell personally identifiable information, like someone’s name, it is fairly free to package and sell the data it collects.

Yet privacy advocates said the modern technology of data analytics allowed such fine-grained measurement of a person’s online behavior that the concept of personally identifiable information was all but obsolete.

“Many of the services or apps we use for ‘free’ are monetizing data about us,” said Lee Tien, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization focused on digital rights."

Service Faces Backlash Over a Widespread Practice: Selling User Data - The New York Times