The Data Brokers - {The Egyptian Explained}

 

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Data & Privacy agreement

There is this privacy agreement we all click on when visiting a website or agreeing on sharing some data related to our internet usage. Certainly, not all of us get to check these points but the thing is we all agree and tick on the box to continue the internet surfing. In Egypt, there are interesting ways for data-trading so others could communicate their sales and cause promotion. you could give your number once, but this number's life cycle will just begin its journey in sales and promotions dissemination.

Egypt's Data Brokers

The mobile / phone number is expected to be laid in one of the data Brokers in Egypt to incessantly call and continue on calling to promote whatever real-estate projects which happen to be out of your budget. it will not be limited to one real-estate company; however, it will be handed to all the companies with real-estate projects in town.

The data-trading is not exclusive to real-estate sales or the multitude of products available on market. It could even be handed to philanthropic networks in the country to promote certain humanitarian cases and causes. same applied with promotional messages or marketing based on the data trading to promote certain discounts or offers.

So, are you interested?

The call usually starts with an inquiry about the person's name as listed in the sheet of the call-center agent. Then there is an introduction about the NGO/company followed by the famous question: so, are you interested?

Again, the data is not acquired by one NGO or company. Actually, it is handed and circulated within certain networks like networks for real-estate companies and another network for NGO companies. After having a conversation with one of the call-center agents on this and inquiring about the person/agency which handed him/her the data, the response is mainly that it is out of his work scope, and he/she has not any info on this. The task of he/she is just calling the list given to them regardless of their sources.

It is Marvelous how dissemination of a single data element could be distributed among so many networks to market whatever they want to sell. There are also the frauds who impersonate any character to market even imaginary products or causes through the data dissemination.

Sold data and social normalization

Bottomline is our data is being sold but it is equivalently interesting that the people themselves do not recognize how important data is. In Egypt, we all reached the point where we normalized the data-trading and normalized the presence of data Brokers. We, kind of, adapted to the fact that everyone is sold data, so it is unanimously affecting everyone.

Data is something that could be valuable, that's why it is being sold and not for everyone!