of information broker; some people may have a bachelor’s degree in business or marketing, while others may have a background in library science, or may have worked for a database provider. Services Information brokering has been described as the "business of buying and selling information as a commodity". Information brokers have been defined by the (US) Federal Trade Commission as "companies that collect information, including personal information about consumers, from a wide variety of sources for the purpose of reselling such information to their customers for various purposes, including verifying an individual’s identity, differentiating records, marketing products, and preventing financial fraud". Gartner defines an information broker as "a business that aggregates information from a variety of sources; processes it to enrich, cleanse or analyze it; and licenses it to other organizations". It states that data is "licensed for particular or limited uses" rather than sold to a client. Information brokers (IBs) collect and collate data concerning myriad topics, ranging from the daily communications of an individual to more specialized data such as product registrations, patents and copyright data, mostly from publicly available sources, usually obtained from online databases. They may also provide various other services, such as analysing the data and writing reports on them; creating databases for clients; or updating clients whenever new information on a specific topic or person. Clients use data brokers to save themselves time and money, as the brokers are trained in the skills needed to retrieve such information effectively and efficiently. Information brokers are secondary researchers, who find information on a variety of subjects, including companies (often competitors), markets, people, and products. Their role includes analysis and synthesis of the data they find, Brokers may find everything else they can about an individual on the Internet, and aggregate that data with information from a variety of other sources. Information brokers sometimes specialise in a specific area, such as market research, statistics, or scientific data. Clients of information brokers come from a wide range of industries and professions, including manufacturing, financial institutions, political parties, government agencies and historians. Non-profit organizations might benefit from information which helps them to apply for grant funding, and real estate agents often use IBs to undertake land title searches. Advertising, fraud detection and risk mitigation are three common reasons for using data brokers, and these are the three broad categories defined by the Federal Trade Commission. Information brokers need to