Acxiom has built consumer profiles containing more than 3,000 categories of predictions, and access files obtained by Consumer Reports name more than 100 companies that received data or inferences about particular people, including Disney, GM, GEICO, State Farm, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, and Janssen Pharmaceuticals. The Markup’s September 16 investigation, produced with Consumer Reports and CalMatters, reviewed disclosures from more than 100 people.
The broker takes the ordinary exhaust of life, purchases, addresses, devices, public records, and other commercial data, and turns it into guesses about what people earn, need, fear, and may buy next. Those guesses can then be used to sort households into audiences for marketing, offers, and outreach. Acxiom says it has profiles on roughly 95% of US adults.
The disclosures are unusually revealing because they show both sides of the trade: the predictions assigned to a person and, in many cases, the companies listed as recipients. They do not show that every named company received every field in a consumer’s profile, or precisely what each company did with it. But they make the arrangement visible enough to judge: a sprawling market in personal predictions is operating at a scale consumers can barely inspect, let alone verify.
For Tracey Reed, an Oregon nonprofit worker, that inspection produced a 58-page Acxiom dossier. It attempted to map her income, employment, education, shopping, charitable giving, and past addresses, including latitude and longitude coordinates. Reed said much of it was wrong.
“I think it’s pretty gross that people are treated like sources of wealth to be mined.”, Tracey Reed, Oregon resident
That is the plainest reading of these files. The product is not simply an address list. It is a guide to which people appear most persuadable, most profitable, or most vulnerable at a particular moment.
More than 3,000 predictions and more than 100 named buyers
The categories found in the Consumer Reports disclosures run from mundane to invasive. Acxiom files included the ages and genders of children, estimated alcohol use, household and employment traits, food insecurity, ability to pay medical expenses, body-mass-index percentiles, and likelihood of obtaining a mammogram. The disclosures also contained 0-to-100 scores for predicted purchases and behavior, such as whether someone might be in the market for a Tesla Cybertruck.
A score is not knowledge. It is a probability model dressed up as a person’s biography. Acxiom chief privacy officer Jordan Abbott made that explicit in 2024, calling the company’s consumer inferences “informed guesses” that are not always accurate.
The access files show why that distinction matters. In a September 2024 report, Consumer Watchdog said an Acxiom report incorrectly classified its investigator’s race and religion, and gave him a 99-out-of-100 score for using DoorDash to buy groceries, although he said he had never used the service. The newer Consumer Reports project found clear errors too, including one profile with six different estimates for a person’s age. The Markup reported that the underlying profiles were frequently inaccurate.
A score is not knowledge. It is a probability model dressed up as a person’s biography.
Acxiom says its health-related categories indicate possible interest in health information, treatment, or products, rather than a diagnosis. It also says a household-level assimilation score does not identify an individual’s race, ethnicity, or immigration status. Those distinctions are part of Acxiom’s response to the reporting. They do not alter the basic commercial utility of the classification: companies can target people as if the prediction were true.
The named recipient lists span retailers, automakers, travel businesses, telecommunications firms, banks, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies. The reporting identified Disney, GM, major insurers, banks, and Janssen among the companies appearing in the disclosures. Acxiom says its buyers may not use its data to set credit or insurance eligibility or prices. Privacy experts told The Markup that data products marketed outside the legal definition of a credit report can create gaps in those protections. That leaves extensive room for financial and health-based segmentation before a formal eligibility decision is made.
There are now limited ways to push back. Oregon residents can request access, correction, deletion, and a recipient list; the state also prohibited sales of residents’ precise geolocation data on January 1, 2026. California’s Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP, requires registered brokers to process statewide deletion requests at least every 45 days from August 1, 2026. The California Privacy Protection Agency says matching records must be deleted, including associated inferences.
These rights are better than a locked door with no key. But they remain state-dependent, and they put the burden on a person to discover, request, read, and correct a commercial profile that may contain thousands of claims they never made. It is the same privacy problem seen in the Hims & Hers health-data privacy case: sensitive information becomes more valuable as it moves farther from the person it describes.
Consumer Reports said its membership arm also uses information derived from brokers, including Acxiom, to assess consumer interests and likelihood of membership; it said it does not use the data to set prices or share it with brokers. The disclosure is in the organization’s account of its project.
The files do not prove that every prediction changed a person’s price, insurance outcome, job prospect, or medical care. They show something more immediate: more than 100 people were able to see a market where companies buy detailed estimates of who they are, and the estimates can be wildly wrong. Routine technology use already supplies much of the raw material for that market.
Key Takeaways
- Consumer Reports access requests exposed Acxiom profiles with predictions across more than 3,000 categories.
- The disclosures named more than 100 corporate recipients of consumer data or inferences.
- Acxiom profiles included financial, health-related, household, demographic, and purchase-behavior predictions.
- Consumer reporting and a 2024 Consumer Watchdog investigation found errors in Acxiom files.
- Oregon and California now provide consumer rights to access or delete certain broker-held data.
Further Reading
- Who’s buying your personal data: Disney, GM, your insurer and bank. Here’s what they get, The Markup and Consumer Reports investigation into Acxiom disclosures and named recipients.
- Data brokers have detailed files on you. Here’s what’s in them, and how it impacts you, Visual explainer of data-broker identifiers, inferences, and predictive scores.
- Data Stalkers LAYOUT EDIT v2, Consumer Watchdog’s review of an Acxiom access file and its inaccuracies.
- Privacy Law FAQs for Consumers, Oregon guidance on privacy access, correction, deletion, and geolocation rules.
- Information for Data Brokers – California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA), California guidance on the DROP deletion-request system.