This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult
This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult
Every move you make. Every click you take. Every game you
play. Every place you stay. They’ll be watching you.
By David Gauvey Herbert August 5, 2016 — 4:55 AM PDT
Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most
important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database
subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been
able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV
records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive
reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with
the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you
donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in
last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.
IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion
business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its
customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company’s database service, idiCORE, combines
public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief
Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from
clients—it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young
people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index
transactions. “We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom
and dad,” he says.
Dubner declined to provide a demo of idiCORE or furnish
the company’s report on me. But he says these personal profiles include all
known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property
ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned;
criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting
permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include
photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers—billions
of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and time stamps to help PIs surveil
people or bust alibis.
IDI also runs two coupon websites, allamericansavings.com
and samplesandsavings.com, that collect purchasing and behavioral data. When I
signed up for the latter, I was asked for my e-mail address, birthday, and home
address, information that could easily link me with my idiCORE profile. The
site also asked if I suffered from arthritis, asthma, diabetes, or depression,
ostensibly to help tailor its discounts.
Users and industry analysts say the addition of
purchasing and behavioral data to conventional data fusion outmatches rival
systems in terms of capabilities—and creepiness. “The cloud never forgets, and
imperfect pictures of you composed from your data profile are carefully filled
in over time,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a
consulting firm. “We’re like bugs in amber, completely trapped in the web of
our own data.”
When logging in to IDI and similar databases, a PI must
select a permissible use for a search under U.S. privacy laws. The Federal
Trade Commission oversees the industry, but PI companies are largely expected
to police themselves, because a midsize outfit may run thousands of searches a
month.
Dubner says most Americans have little to fear. As
examples, he cites idiCORE uses such as locating a missing person and nabbing a
fraud or terrorism suspect.
IDI, like much of the data-fusion industry, traces its
lineage to Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler and self-taught programmer who
began fusing sets of public data from state and federal governments in the
early 1990s. After Sept. 11, law enforcement’s interest in commercial databases
grew, and more money and data began raining down, says Julia Angwin, a reporter
who wrote about the industry in her 2014 book, Dragnet Nation.
Asher died suddenly in 2013, leaving behind his company,
the Last One (TLO), which credit bureau TransUnion bought in bankruptcy for
$154 million. Asher’s disciples, including Dubner, left TLO and eventually
teamed up with Michael Brauser, a former business partner of Asher’s, and
billionaire health-care investor Phillip Frost. In May 2015, after a flurry of
purchases and mergers, the group rebranded its database venture as IDI.
Besides pitching its databases to big-name PIs (Kroll,
Control Risks), law firms, debt collectors, and government agencies, IDI says
it’s also targeting consumer marketers. The 200-employee company had revenue of
about $40 million in its most recent quarter and says 2,800 users signed up for
idiCORE in the first month after its May release. It declined to provide more
recent figures. The company’s data sets are growing, too. In December, Frost
helped underwrite IDI’s $100 million acquisition of marketing profiler Fluent,
which says it has 120 million profiles of U.S. consumers. In June, IDI bought
ad platform Q Interactive for a reported $21 million in stock.
IDI may need Frost’s deep pockets for a while. The PI
industry’s three favorite databases are owned by TransUnion and media giants
Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. “There’s no shortage,” says Chuck
McLaughlin, chairman of the board of the World Association of Detectives, which
has about 1,000 members. “The longer you’re in business, the more data you
have, the better results.” He uses TLO and Tracers Information Specialists.
Steve Rambam, a PI who hosts Nowhere to Hide on the
Investigation Discovery channel, says marketing data remains a niche monitoring
tool compared with social media, but its power can be unparalleled. “You may
not know what you do on a regular basis, but I know,” Rambam says. “I know it’s
Thursday, you haven’t eaten Chinese food in two weeks, and I know you’re due.”
—With Olga Kharif
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