According to Vermont Statute, 9 V.S.A. § 2430 (4)(a) a data broker is a “business, or unit or units of a business, separately or together, that knowingly collects and sells or licenses to third parties the brokered personal information of a consumer with whom the business does not have a direct relationship.” The largest data brokers in the United States are Acxiom, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian.
In the case of Vermont v. Clearview AI (2020), the state of Vermont brought a consumer fraud complaint against the then-registered data broker Clearview AI for violating the state of Vermont’s Consumer Protection Act. Clearview AI employed “screen scraping” methods to collect a mass of biometric data from billions of publicly accessible images on the internet, including those of children, without the knowledge or consent of the individuals in these images. These scraped images were then used to train an algorithm in order to create their facial recognition technology. Clearview AI is no longer a registered data broker in the state of Vermont and reached a settlement agreement in ACLU v. Clearview AI which permanently banned the company from making its database available to individuals and private companies in the United States. Clearview AI is most often utilized for law enforcement surveillance.
See also: artificial intelligence (AI)
For additional information see this Connecticut Law Review article: Carpenter, the Fourth Amendment, and Third-Party Workarounds, this Michigan Law Review article: Unfair Collection: Reclaiming Control of Publicly Available Personal Information from Data Scrapers, this Columbia Science and Technology Law Review article: Data Misappropriation: A Trade Secret Cause of Action for Data Scraping and a New Paradigm for Database Protection, and this Vanderbilt Law Review article: Data Autonomy.
[Last updated in April of 2023 by the Wex Definitions Team]