One data broker told Congress his company relied on public databases or Internet searches to get personal information.

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The Journal obtained the Medicare databases on the condition that it not reveal financial or other information about individual physicians.

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They have their own way of managing the information in databases which cannot be easily changed or shared with other applications.

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Others, like Britain or America, keep information in quite separate databases dealing with, say tax, pensions, elections, passports, driving licences and health care.

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On the Internet platform, companies get developers by offering them access to big databases they could not afford on their own (such as map coordinates, calendar information or sales tracking information) and letting them build things against it.

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