Comedian Jerry Seinfeld made banality funny, but marketers exploit it for darker purposes.

Consider a Tweet I made recently: “I’m walking to Whole Foods after work to buy a 6 of local-brew #IPA. Suggestions?”

Without realizing it, I saturated this 81-character message with personal details, and shared it to the world:

1. I am over 21.
2. I live in an urban area.
3. I am employed.
4. I have discretionary income.
5. I drink beer.
6. I drink at places other than bars and restaurants.
7. I know people who have similar interests.
8. I seek the opinions of others online.
9. I am not brand-loyal when it comes to beer.
10. I am able to carry at least six pounds.

“There are eight unique data points per Tweet,” said Adrienne LaFrance, Staff Writer for The Atlantic. Here, I found ten, and my Tweet had capacity for 59 more characters. Lucky that I didn’t use them. Who knows what else I could have revealed.

Based on my innocuous Tweet, marketers can deduce that the car I drive isn’t a Hummer or a Cadillac Escalade. They can bet that I have a college degree. But that’s beside the point. They already know. Remind me again who has the information power, because it’s not me.

Every second, about 6,000 Tweets pulse through Twitter. Marketers mine this noisy digital exhaust to extract fuel to power their ravenous revenue machinery. Automated algorithms work 24/7 assembling details about individual human beings. By combining online and offline information about people, companies called list brokers create large files of personal artifacts. This information gets passed through a serpentine value chain, where it’s divided, changed, enhanced, and re-combined with more data. What gets harvested can be described as digital gold: richly-detailed profiles of consumers. List brokers package them into tidy, organized, fungible groupings called lead lists, vital for business development. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

But Goldberg’s whimsical imagination mimicked the physical world, where noisy events happen in plain sight. Lead generation processes depend on subterfuge. Prospect curation machinery works cleanly and silently, away from the public eye. Consumers are unaware about who (or what) collects their information, or who gets to use it. Reason #412 that I don’t wear a Fitbit, play online “brain games,” or use gene testing services. None of these businesses are required to comply with patient-privacy laws in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Many expectant or postpartum parents would be surprised to learn that their personal identities have been meticulously collected, and electronically shipped to and fro. Their names, and a whole lot more, are regularly sold to businesses, including eager telemarketers and digital agencies. For example, Dataman Group can sell you a New Baby List, which includes pre-natal families. Among the fields are contact information, home ownership data, dwelling unit type, estimated household income, number of months until birth, and whether the birth is (or will be), the mother’s first.

Dataman’s website makes a flamboyant appeal to its prospective customers:

Almost 1 out of every 2 births today is a first birth, creating enormous marketing opportunities.

Most first-birth families are also two-career families; working moms and dads with large, disposable incomes and no brand loyalties where child care products are concerned.

As a market, these growing families outspend childless couples 2 to 1 and are prime candidates for not only a full range of baby products, but also day care, home entertainment, photography, insurance, recreation, and catalog offers. Information on any product that your company offers that can offer these young families a better way of life will be welcomed.

No other life cycle list offers the accuracy, cost-efficiency or selections of OUR new parents mailing lists or prenatal list. You can even select Pre-Natal households by trimester….or New Babies by actual month-of-birth.

At the end of this sales pitch appears a curious request, one that hints at nefarious use: “Note: Sample mail piece and/or telemarketing script required on all orders with Children information. We support responsible marketing!”

Here is where things turn rough. With a selection tweak or two, marketers can bubble up motivated buyers – say, mothers in the third trimester, or people living more than one mile from a playground. So far, so good. But with additional tweaks, marketers can find greater buying urgency by exposing a related demographic: vulnerable buyers. Some more tweaks to reach buying motivation’s top rung: The Desperate. A lucrative target with tantalizingly short sales cycles, little comparison shopping activity, and low customer information power. All it takes to get the cash machine spinning is an appealing product, a little imagination, and the right search criteria.

How about targeting single moms below a certain income level, living in the 22 states that have declined Medicaid Expansion? That information would be attractive to rental appliance and furniture outlets, credit card companies, and loan providers. A warping of the ideal, “give customers what they want.”

This is the way revenue generation works in the digital age. A single New Baby lead list supports everything from aspirational selling to predatory marketing. Innovative baby backpacks to take small children on fun adventures,  or payday loans for food and rent payments when cash runs out. Which way you go depends on what you’re selling, and how you sort and select the prospects.

Information that list brokers use sometimes comes from landing pages designed to surreptitiously collect personal information, which then gets sold to others. When I entered the phrase, need money for food, into a search window, I received advertising links that assumed ancillary concerns: “Bad credit personal loan,” “500 to 20000 personal loan,” “sell your house fast,” and “are you eligible for aid?” These are emblematic of the marketing predations that occur, often in plain sight. The last ad, linking to a website ending in dot-com, clearly wanted to find out more about me. I did not click on it.

When I re-entered the same search phrase one hour later, the aid-eligibility ad had vanished, presumably because Google recognized the ruse, and removed it. In fact, in 2014, “Google removed 524 million advertisements and banned more than 214,000 advertisers from its search results. But predatory companies are still finding loopholes,” LaFrance wrote in an article, How Google Plays Whac-a-Mole with Shady Advertisers. Squashing 524 million ads per year equates to around 1,000 ads per minute. That’s a lot of Whac-a-mole.

I conducted this search as a simple experiment for this article. But what if my query was genuine, and my situation perilous? What if I proceeded to fill out the form? Who would have my information? What would I unleash? Sadly, there are few laws protecting prospects. Congress hasn’t passed a consumer privacy law since 2009. This, despite huge increases in social media use, advances in data science, and wide adoption of marketing automation. At least my beer purchase was discretionary. Vulnerable prospects face privacy hazards that are more poignant.

“This process for collecting customer data exploits a loophole in consumer protection laws. Companies can buy lists of people who have asked about diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s disease. They can learn about victims of assault and people diagnosed with HIV,” said Aaron Rieke, Project Director at Upturn. Rieke was a panelist on NPR’s Tech Tuesday program, When Companies Use Your Online Searches Against You (November 10, 2015). “How did they get my name?” Amazement that happens all too frequently online.

It’s not just from hijacking customer trust, and stealthily scraping information from online forms. In 2013, 43% of free health apps sold users’ personal data, according to a study by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “Fewer than half of mobile apps that collected health and fitness information provided a privacy policy in which they spelled out how user data could be shared, and 43% of free apps tested by the group shared personal information with advertisers,” The Wall Street Journal reported in April, 2015.

“The extent of consumer profiling today means that data brokers often know as much – or even more – about us than our family and friends, including our online and in-store purchases, our political and religious affiliations, our income and socioeconomic status, and more,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “It’s time to bring transparency and accountability to bear on this industry on behalf of consumers, many of whom are unaware that data brokers even exist.”

“Technology gives us power but cannot guide us as to how to use that power. The market gives us choices but leaves us uninstructed as to how to make those choices,” Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote in his book, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.

Those conundrums occur every day in marketing. “We’re doing this because we can,” clients tell me when discussing their marketing strategies and tactics. I urge them to include an additional hurdle. “Ask yourselves, ‘what is the right thing to do?’

Note: this article was published on CustomerThink. To read the original column, please click here.