The data brokers who’ve made fortunes from collecting and sharing millions of people’s personal information tend to fly under the radar. Names like LiveRamp or RELX might not be familiar to most Americans, but they’re making themselves known on Capitol Hill. Collectively, data broker spending on lobbying in 2020 rivaled the spending of individual Big Tech firms like Facebook and Google. The Markup searched lobbying disclosures in the U.S. Senate’s Lobbying Disclosure Act database and the watchdog Center for Responsive Politics’ tool OpenSecrets for the names of companies that registered as data brokers in Vermont or California. Those states are…
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