I mean (on the legitimate market) do some businesses have sales teams that cold call other companies to offer customer data and negotiate price and terms each time, or is there something like an eBay for companies to offer or search and buy different customer data sets?
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It’s a euphemism that implies the company is profiting in some way off your data.
Sometimes, yes, the company is literally selling the data to some other company. They will aggregate it, package it up, correlate it with other data they have, and if you’re lucky anonymize it to not identify a specific person, then sell that data to another company who might use it for research, marketing etc. The aggregate data is a commodity that can be traded like any other, and yes there are marketplaces for it (both legitimate and underground).
Or they sell ongoing access to that data. Or let other parties access it in exchange for some benefit, like getting analytics services, or integrated authentication functionality, or using CAPTCHAs to prevent bots.
But it’s a bad business strategy to sell the data outright. So smarter companies use the data to provide specific services, like selling access to certain demographics for targeted advertising.
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