Facebook: The New King of Data Brokers?

Perhaps you've never heard of the world's largest data brokers—and that's exactly how they like it. For instance, Acxiom brands itself as "a marketing technology and services company." That sounds fairly benign, and it's certainly preferable to the sinister term data broker.

When it comes to data, though, today Acxiom can't hold a candle to Facebook. There is a reason that the latter's stock is flying so high. Unlike Apple, a company decidedly not in the data business, Facebook has certainly figured out how to monetize petabytes of unstructured user data. And Wall Street has taken notice.