For years, data brokers have operated in a controversial corner of the internet economy, collecting and reselling Americans’ personal information for government or commercial use, such as targeted ads. “They’re building inferences and scores and categorizations from patterns in your life, your actions, where you go, what you eat — and what are we supposed to do, not live?”But the data-broker industry remains unregulated at the federal level, and the United States lacks a comprehensive federal privacy law that would set rules for how apps and websites treat people’s information more broadly. Dixon, who was not involved in the Duke research, said she hoped the findings and the Supreme Court ruling would serve as a wake-up call for how this data could lead to real-world risks