With basically almost every company collecting all our data at all times, who exactly are they selling it too? Wouldn't all these companies by this point have all yhe same information?

“Almost every company”

You mean like 5-10 major companies?

There are thousands of smaller companies buying ad space and access to consumer data.

And “buying data” isn’t what it sounds like for the most part. Few companies are out there buying and selling raw data tied to individuals. For the most part it is a company buying heavily targeted ads from someone like Google that has ALL of your data. They know, with surgical precision, how to target ads at you. Company B just tells Google “ we want to target a 35 year old, white, dad of three that is lacking in his masculinity and wants to feel rugged, while not making him feel emasculated”.

The you get a Dr Squatch ad.

I just like the way the soap smells
- There's like 5-6 possible soap smells made for men, surely you could find similar smells elsewhere?
- I caved and got it because people would not shut up about it. I don’t care as long as it smells good and keeps the bugs away.
This is gonna be the death of democracy when political advertising comes into play (as it already has).

"Point this piece of fake news at uneducated 40 year old single parents in <area>" - "point this piece of scientific news reinforcing my party's message at university students who are interested in " and on and on.

My mom gets fake news advertisements on Facebook all the time, occasionally they are political in nature. Platforms aren't doing their due diligence at all, so government must act to restrict the information that can be collected and the specificity of the targeting that may be employed.

Our economies worked in TV times, with broad-stroke advertising - why couldn't they now? We don't need this.
- Now it's making targeted ads that cost less than a broadcast and has a greater conversion rate. Supermarkets and discount stores can use TV, not everyone wants a 20x night time rifle scope at 3pm on a Wednesday during the Bold and the Beautiful
Facebook was the same. A company would hand them a token for a visitor that went to their site like say Amazon. They then tell Facebook if you see that visitor token show them an ad for this vacuum cleaner. No information ever traded hands except some anonymous id and money.

But I have had places actually sell my information. Comcast Various Banks The State of California

I had a weird last name attached to Comcast never used it anywhere elae. Started getting mail from various companies for Rev WeirdLastname

I registered an LLC, all these compliance companies now send me mail. Thanks California

Tech companies not so much they just target ads and I can block those
- This varies state to state, but it’s likely that your LLC registration (including its members names) is public record. In that case, the state didn’t sell your info. Anyone can view that info and use it to contact you.
  
  This sort of thing was rather startling to me when my wife and I bought our house. Apparently property sales are all public record where we live, so we started getting mail from random insurance companies within a month after moving.
Why do I only get ads about "Heart Doctor BEGS Americans to stop doing this with their blueberries"?
- Because you don't have Ublock Orgin installed.
- Are we not supposed to stick blueberries up our butts?

Consumer buying patterns and browsing behaviors are constantly changing in the aggregate. It's not about an individual, it's about "trends".

And of course, a lot of it is also complete bullshit, as you suspected. People with MBAs in marketing are pretty good at justifying their parasitic existence to gullible executives.

It's not that all of the data is useless. Every business needs some information to compete. But, these data miners have gone deep into the rabbit hole of "business intelligence" and are often hoarding information its own sake and to look good to the boss.

Effectively, as an advertiser, you can pay for some info on someone you have the option to show an ad to.

They'll tell you things like "they are in their 40s and love anime and shopped at target recently"

The worst part is that typically, when you get hyper-specific enough, you can make unidentified info identifiable.

"Male, muslim, just got married, works as a plumber, late 20s, lives in this part of this city, has this device" and then paired with "has this IP" (narrows down to the block or house)

Also the US government buys the same info via shell companies.

."has this IP" (narrows down to the block or house)

Even worse, They know what room you're in.

I sold geolocation advertising and they know where your cell phone is within 15'.

Ever notice an ad from a competitor of a business you just visited? Car lots love this one. They geotag all the other car lots in town and if you go to one of them, the next time you check Kelly Blue book on this used Camry, an ad for a deal on a Honda Civic pops up.

Creepy as hell
- I worked at a retail store that had some sort of Google beacon that would give our store the top search result if someone used Google in the store. At least I think that's how it worked.

At this stage it’s bots collecting data to be parsed by bots to be interpreted by bots. Using assumption based connections to loosely tie IDs together and packaged like it’s the gospel.

Garbage orgs buying garbage info to sell garbage.

🙌

Companies like BlueKai collect and aggregate these to form ...err aggregates, or groupings.

If one company wanted to sell their ads to "lonely", "adult", "men", "needing hot milfs" and in "their area", they'll batch some groupings and sell it to that company to target.

People move all the time and so the hottest, most recent info pays the highest.

Where/how can I buy one of these groupings? If I happened to be, say, a hot milf?

Advertising agencies mostly. Probably a few government offices, too. Google uses theirs in-house.

all have the same information

Thousands of "bits" of new info are being generated every second

Permanently Deleted

A lot of it is.
As the other guy said you're not actually buying data, just targeting ads really specifically. this means that you pay google to show your ad to x people and they go "okay we've done that" and basically you have to take them at their word.

but surely they wouldn't lie? well, not on technicalities. for years, you could buy pre-video ads that would play on youtube, and it turns out they would also play them across various websites, not at all to do with youtube or that type of content consumption, but it's obviously all in the TOS so you can't sue them for bait and switch :)
- Permanently Deleted

There isn't really a universal answer. Different companies have different objectives. Some of them sell it to third parties, some of them use it for a variety of business purposes. Some of them collect and store it without any idea what they are going to do with it.

I actually worked for a company that did this. They're a commercial and industrial vehicle OEM. A lot of their hardware interfaces with the vehicle CAN bus (the computer network on all modern vehicles). They would vacuum up every message broadcast on the CAN bus and dump it into a data lake while having absolutely no idea what they were going to do with it.

So let's say you use your credit card to buy drinks at the bar every single night. This data gets to the health insurance company and they might raise your rates. I remember 15+ years ago talking about credit data with people who were involved. This is before facebook was anywhere as big as it is now (to give context). I worked for a company that developed software for POS terminals and no one ever heard of the company I worked for except this girl I met from American express. They wanted so badly to get data from us.

Just ballpark, how many companies do you think there are in the USA?

Not from USA, but I want to have a go at that question.

I would say, around 2,000,000 companies?
- That’s about what I would have guessed. And I’d say it answers the question. About 100 companies are collecting tons of data, then selling it to 10,000 more companies.

It depends if you do new things tomorrow means new data to collect. This business is mainly a market forecast not only on your past details but especially on what you do today and you will do tomorrow. If tomorrow, for example, you arrange a wedding, by knowing I can arrange it to make my own profit for example by selling you white roses.

It's purpose is to make marketing or influencing as quantifiable as possible

typo in title

Good thing you weren’t specific. Someone might have mistaken your comment as helpful. Can’t have that!
- Yhe arrogance of some Lemmings is astounding.
- Two*, teh*