Exclusive: Profile data was scraped without user consent or knowledge to “build a three-dimensional picture” on millions of people. A little-known data firm was able to build 48 million personal profiles, combining data from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others — without the users’ knowledge or consent. Localblox, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, says it “automatically crawls, discovers, extracts, indexes, maps and augments data in a variety of formats from the web and from exchange networks.” Since its founding in 2010, the company has focused its collection on publicly accessible data sources, like social networks Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and real estate site Zillow to name a few, to produce profiles.
ORIGINAL SOURCE: ZDNet
