Data broker glossary

The trade in data borrows its vocabulary from marketing, law, finance and machine learning at once, and each field uses the same words a little differently. A marketer hears "first-party data" and thinks of cookies and consent banners. A lawyer hears it and thinks about who collected the information and under which privacy notice. An AI lab hears it and wonders whether the seller can prove where it came from. When a seller and a buyer use one word in two senses, the misunderstanding usually surfaces late, in diligence or in the licence, where it is expensive to fix.

Every entry here starts with a short definition you can quote, then shows the term at work in a realistic dataset deal and sets it beside the words it is most often confused with. Where a term has a legal meaning in a state law, the entry says so and points to the law page. Where an entry mentions a figure, it names the source; the rest is explanation, not data.

• Zero-, first-, second- and third-party data describe one question from four angles: how far the data has travelled from the people it describes. Read them together.
• Monetization, commercialization and licensing are often swapped. Monetization is the goal, commercialization is the work of taking data to market, and licensing is the contract that lets someone else use it.
• Data product and data as a product sound alike but aren't. The first is a thing a buyer can license; the second is a way of running data inside a company.
• Enrichment and append both add to a file. Append fills named gaps by matching; enrichment is the wider job of adding context.
• Data broker, information broker and data aggregator overlap heavily. Each entry says where the lines usually fall, and the law pages show where a statute draws them.

Examples are illustrations, written to show how a term behaves in a deal, not reports of real transactions. Definitions are our own wording. Legal points describe the law in general and say when to ask a lawyer. Each page shows the date it last changed and lists the sources behind any factual claim with the date they were checked.