The FTC did a report on 9 data brokers. Scary.

"Data Brokers Collect and Store Billions of Data Elements Covering Nearly Every U.S. Consumer: Data brokers collect and store a vast amount of data on almost every U.S. household and commercial transaction.  Of the nine data brokers, one data broker's database has information on 1.4 billion consumer transactions and over 700 billion aggregated data elements; another data broker's database covers one trillion dollars in consumer transactions; and yet another data broker adds three billion new records each month to its databases. Most importantly, data brokers hold a vast array of information on individual consumers. For example, one of the nine data brokers has 3000 data segments for nearly every U.S. consumer."

The industry says that it is for targeted advertising. Ha! And it provides risk mitigation for consumers. Again HA!

The data is stored indefinitely. Consumers don't know how they are scored or any way to fix it.

How did I find this 2014 report? This article about a lawsuit: Supreme Court case pits privacy rights against Internet data brokers