Over 1.8 cr Indian citizens’ personal records exposed in 10 data broker breaches

New Delhi: India is the second-most affected country when it comes to data broker breaches, and more than 1.8 crore (18.7 million) personal records of Indian citizens were compromised through 10 data breaches in the past 20 years, a report has revealed.
A data broker is a business that aggregates information from a variety of sources, processes it to enrich, cleanse or analyse it and licenses it to other organisations.
According to Incogni, a leading data removal service by VPN service provider Surfshark, India is among the top five countries most affected by the most significant data broker breaches, led by the US which has seen a massive 207.6 million personal records of their citizens being compromised in the same period.
The other most affected countries are the UK, Brazil and Canada.
“Data privacy is becoming increasingly alarming, yet many people are still unaware of the hidden market in which data brokers operate. Upon reviewing the findings, we have seen that data brokers can also experience a data breach, just like any other company. However, they are the ones dealing with massive amounts of sensitive data,” said Darius Belejevas, Head of Incogni.
Incogni’s researchers analysed 506 registered, US-based data brokers and found that in the past 20 years, 23 (4.5 per cent) of these companies have suffered data breaches, and at least 10 data broker breaches to date resulted in at least 1 million user records being leaked, exposing a total of 444.5 million records.