Sick Grandparents For Sale By Data Miners At 15 Cents A Name

Sharing Information

One of the more common ways to end up on a health list is by sharing health information on a mail or online survey, according to interviews with data brokers and the review of dozens of health-related lists. In some cases the surveys are tied to discounts or sweepstakes. Others are sent by a company seeking customer feedback after a purchase. The information is then sold to data brokers who repackage and resell it.

Epsilon, which has data on 54 million households based on information gathered from its Shopper’s Voice survey, has lists containing information on 447,000 households in which someone has Alzheimer’s, 146,000 with Parkinson’s disease, and 41,000 with Lou Gehrig’s disease. The Irving, Texas-based company provides survey respondents with coupons and a chance to win $10,000 in exchange for information on their household’s spending habits and health.

The company will share with individual consumers specific information it has gathered, said Jeanette Fitzgerald, Epsilon’s chief privacy officer.

Suffering Seniors

KBM Group, one of the largest collectors of consumer health data based in Richardson, Texas, has health information on at least 82 million consumers categorized by more than 100 medical conditions obtained from surveys conducted by third-party contractors. The company declined to provide an example of the surveys. KBM uses the information for its own marketing clients, and sells it to other data brokers, said Gary Laben, chief executive officer of KBM.

“None of our clients wants to engage with consumers or businesses who don’t want to engage with them,” he said. “Our business is about creating mutual value and if there is none, the process doesn’t work.”

Data repackaging is extensive and pervasive. The Suffering Seniors Mailing List help marketers push everything from lawn care to financial products. It consists of the names, addresses, and health information of 4.7 million “suffering seniors,” according to promotional material for the list. Beach List Direct Inc. sells the information for 15 cents a name. Marketed as “the perfect list for mailers targeting the ailing elderly,” it contains a breakdown of those with diseases like depression, cancer and Alzheimer’s, according to its seller’s website.

Clay Beach, the contact on Beach List’s website, did not return calls and e-mails over the past month.

‘Confidential’ Clients

Little is known about who buys medical lists since data brokers say their clients are confidential, Rockefeller said at a hearing on the issue in December.

Promotional material for the Suffering Seniors data found by Bloomberg on Beach List’s website initially included a list of users. The names of those users have since been removed.

One customer was magazine publisher Meredith Corp., which used the list in a test for a subscription offer for Diabetic Living magazine, said Jenny McCoy, a spokeswoman. Other users have included the American Diabetes Association, which said a small portion of names from the list was given to one of its local chapters, and Remedy Health Media, a publisher of medical websites.