Popular Science: “If you’ve started noticing the term “data broker” in the last few months, you’re not alone. While they’ve been a problem for a while, a recent John Oliver segment exploring how they work and a new ad from Apple highlighting the practice have both called attention to the issue, helping to bring this increasingly important practice out from the shadowy corners of the internet. If you’ve ever wondered about the details, here’s what you need to know.  Data brokers—also called information brokers—are businesses that aggregate, process, and license information to other companies. While some data they sell is environmental or statistical, they often combine data about individual people from multiple sources to create lists of email addresses, phone numbers, or physical addresses that can be sold to marketers. This is the kind of practice we’re concerned about. Data brokers are under scrutiny at the moment because people are increasingly, and understandably, concerned about privacy. One Pew Research study found that 79 percent of Americans were concerned about how much data companies were collecting about them, and 81 percent of Americans felt the potential risks of data collection outweighed the potential benefits…”