Premium content: This is from our forthcoming subscriber-exclusive Media Miss newsletter, where we will take you inside the algorithms and agendas shaping what you see. Today, I dive into the seedy world of data brokers and how they make money from people’s online behaviors. Rather, I carried out what one online privacy advocate called “the equivalent of a digital drug deal.” The experiment reveals how data brokers amass vast profiles about all of us — and are willing to sell our personal information to just about anyone with little more than a credit card. That’s the work of data brokers, who make up a $470 billion industry that archives people’s interests and, ultimately, gets them to open their wallets.