Von Ralf Keuper
Für gewöhnlich werden mit dem Begriff “Datenkraken” die großen Internetkonzerne wie Google, facebook, Amazon und Apple assoziiert. Zwar ist diese Zuordnung nicht falsch, jedoch lenkt sie die Blicke von den eigentlichen Datenkraken ab, die über einen Datenbestand verfügen, auf den auch Google & Co. (noch) nicht verzichten wollen. Gemeint sind Acxiom, Datalogix und Intelius. Im Paper Research on Identity Ecosystem heisst es dazu:
- Acxiom: The biggest name in town. This global marketing and information management company has databases that include data on 126 million households and 190 million people in the US, and about 500 million active consumers worldwide through 23,000 servers with 1,500 data points. Acxiom is headquartered in the US with offices in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Portugal, China, Australia and New Zealand and processes data from over 150 countries. Acxiom has about 6,000 employees worldwide and a global annual revenue of nearly $1.3 billion. Its current chief product and engineering officer, Phil Mui, developed Google Analytics, and the company also partners with Facebook to develop solutions to improve the reliability of our digital personas even when part of our data is incorrect or missing.
- Datalogix: Part of Oracle Data Cloud, is a consumer data collection company founded in 2002 that manages loyalty card data, connecting offline purchasing data to digital media to improve audience targeting and measure sales impact. This firm aggregates and provides insights on over 2 trillion US dollars in consumer spending to deliver purchase-based targeting. Over 650 customers (mainly advertisers and digital media publishers) use Datalogix, including Facebook and Google.
- Intelius: Founded in 2003, it specialises in public records information. They offer services to consumers and businesses, including background checks, screening services, people search, customer solutions, public records, criminal check, e-mail lookup and identity theft protection. The company has access to many of the world’s most extensive databases and public record repositories, gathering billions of public records annually from a multitude of government and professional entities and assigning them to more than 225 million unique people. Intelius services 300 million monthly requests for access to its databases. In addition to retrieving historical and current data, Intelius leverages proprietary genomic technology to identify connections between people, places and things.