Your personal data — be it your residential address, your phone number, email id, details of what you bought online, age, marital status, income and profession — is all up for sale. Most of this personal data is sold for less than a rupee per person — the cost of a chewing gum.Over one month, ET approached companies called ‘data brokers’ — who hawk their services on online listings and sell personal information — posing as a prospective buyer. For anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000, we were offered personal data of up to 1 lakh people in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi.The lists up for sale are creative and granular. Many of these frauds are perpetrated by scamsters by using freely available personal data to win the confidence of customers to get them to share critical data like CVVs or one-time passwords (OTPs).However, data brokerage is still at a very nascent stage in India. We do not collect any additional information from users directly,” Manu Sehgal, business development leader, emerging markets, told ET.

Source: Economic Times February 27, 2017 19:30 UTC