ChoicePoint gathers data from polic

ChoicePoint gathers data from police, criminal and motor vehicle records; credit and employment histories; current and electronic and previous addresses; professional licenses; and insurance claims to assemble and maintain electronic dossiers on almost every adult in the United States. The computer sells this personal information to business and government agencies. Demand for personal data is so enormous that data broker business such as ChoicePoint are flourishing. In 2011 the two largest credit card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., were planning to link credit card purchase information with consumer social network and other information to create customer profiles that could be sold to advertising firms. Visa processes 45 billion transactions a year and MasterCard process 23 billion transactions. Currently, this transaction information is not linked with consumer internet activities.
A new data analysis technology called nonobvious relationship awareness (NORA) has given both the government and the private sector even more powerful profiling capabilities. NORA can take information about people from many disparate sources, such as employment applications, telephone records, customer listings, and “wanted” lists, and correlate relationships to find obscure hidden connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists (see Figure 12.2).