The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report Tuesday calling for more transparency from data brokers. Today, we take at what the FTC describes as the characteristics of data brokering and the benefits and risks involved.

The report, titled "Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability," suggests a personalized web portal for individuals where they can see where data about them is going and opt out of the system.

"With respect to data brokers that sell marketing products, the Commission recommends that Congress consider legislation requiring data brokers to provide consumers access to their data, including sensitive data held about them, at a reasonable level of detail, and the ability to opt out of having it shared for marketing purposes," reads the FTC report.

Along with four key points the FTC wants Congress to consider when passing legislation on the matter, the FTC also noted some characteristics of the data broker industry and the benefits and risks.

Characteristics of the Industry

1) Data brokers collect consumer data from numerous sources, largely without consumers' knowledge

2) The data broker industry is complex, with multiple layers of data brokers providing data to each other

3) Data brokers collect and store billions of data elements covering nearly every U.S. consumer

4) Data brokers combine and analyze data about consumers to make inferences about them, including potentially sensitive inferences

5) Data brokers combine online and offline data to market to consumers online

Benefits and Risks

1) Consumers benefit from many of the purposes for which data brokers collect and use data

2) At the same time, many of the purposes for which data brokers collect and use data pose risks to consumers

3) Storing data about consumers indefinitely may create security risks

On the subject of just how much choice a consumer has in the brokering of his or her data, the FTC concluces, "To the extent data brokers offer consumers choices about their data, the choices are largely invisible and incomplete."

The subject of data brokering might seem a little distant, but it's easy to see the repercussion when one considers recent cyber breaches and the loss of hundreds of millions of personal records. Target's breach alone affected over 100 million accounts, and a recent CNN Money report indicated that 47 percent of American adults were victims of a cybercrime in the last 12 months alone. Data brokering, and where consumer data goes, could be a way to hedge the problem at the roots.

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