"Personally identifiabledata from the online world is merged with personallyidentifiable information from the offline world, every day, " says Jennifer Barrett, Acxiom's head of global privacy and public policy.
The practice has come under fire in recent months, especially since DoubleClick announced plans to start combining anonymous online data with personallyidentifiable information.
The lack of market transparency into data breaches for anything other than personallyidentifiable information also helps organizations underestimate or hide (intentionally or otherwise) the true cost of cyber incidents.
We are dealing with personallyidentifiable information, so there are privacy issues and data associated with the folks that are filing claims, and how you actually manage this process -- we just need to make sure we get it right.
She also says that, while Acxiom does store personallyidentifiable information, it doesn't store or merge anonymous online-tracking data, such as Web-browsing records.