The Company That Quietly Knows Everything About You

Photo: Justin Bolle/The NY Times

You probably have never heard of Axciom, but it has heard of you. Actually, not only has it heard of you, it knows all about you:

It knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do. 
It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.
Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.

Nathasha Singer tells us all about Axciom in this enlightening New York Times article here.