What does it mean in practice for a company to “sell” your data?

Question

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?

In: 12

Answer 1

I actually had to look up some of these datasets for school and they can be extremely expensive, but you pretty much have it correct. Try googling things like “credit card data set” and you’ll see websites that are selling literally that. It’s not only credit cards but instead for basically anything you can think of. In a way it’s very interesting, in another way it’s pretty scary, but yes there are huge datasets out there made by companies (often as a byproduct of their actual business) that are being sold to people who can afford it.