Every few months now, another story breaks about a data broker quietly reselling consumer information to companies that were never supposed to have it. For years, that backlash stayed contained to consumer privacy circles, the realm of browser extensions and opt-out forms. In 2026, it reached B2B marketing, and the companies caught flat-footed are the ones that never asked where their targeting data actually came from. Atlantic Tech, a data intelligence company founded by Peter Kazan in 2020, has spent the years since building its business around a different answer.
What the Backlash Actually Got Right
The current scrutiny of data brokers is not an overreaction. For a long time, a wide swath of the marketing industry treated third-party data like a warehouse treats inventory: buy it in bulk, sort it later, and sell access to whoever will pay. Nobody involved in that chain, least of all the person whose behavior generated the data in the first place, had much visibility into where it ended up or what it was used for.
That opacity is what regulators, journalists, and now buyers are pushing back on. The complaint centers on how much data was acquired without context, meaningful consent, or anyone downstream taking responsibility for how it was used. Buyers are asking vendors harder questions, and vendors who cannot answer them are losing deals they used to win on price alone.
The Difference Between Collecting Information and Extracting It
Atlantic Tech describes its core work as insight collection, a term the company uses deliberately, for the relationship it implies rather than the volume it describes. Collection implies a relationship with a source: a signal someone gave intentionally, in a context where they understood roughly what it was for. Extraction implies the opposite: information taken from wherever it can be found and stripped of the context that made it meaningful or fair to use.
Atlantic Tech’s model is built around intent-based insight collection, audience data assembled from signals that indicate what someone is actually trying to do, gathered through channels where that intent is being expressed on purpose. That is a narrower pool than a purchased list of scraped identifiers and, the company argues, a more useful one, because the data was never separated from the reason it exists.
Why the Company Says It Won’t Buy Its Way to a Bigger Dataset
There is a fast way to grow a targeting database and a defensible way. The fast way is to buy access to someone else’s list, merge it with an existing one, and stop asking questions about provenance once the numbers look good in a pitch deck. Atlantic Tech has turned down that shortcut more than once, according to the company, even when it meant losing a deal in the short term.
That reasoning is built into how the company acquires and uses data: a client that hires a data intelligence company to represent it to its own customers exposes its brand to whatever that company’s data practices actually are, not just what its marketing promises. The moment a broker’s supply chain becomes a headline, every company that relied on it becomes part of the story.
What Ethical Acquisition Looks Like in Practice
Ethical data acquisition, in Atlantic Tech’s telling, means its audience-targeting and engagement work touches only data the company can trace back to its source and explain in plain language to a client or a regulator, without hedging. It means insight collection stops at the edge of what someone reasonably expected to share, not at the edge of what a script can technically scrape.
It also means treating data management systems as a place where accountability lives, not just storage. Information that cannot be traced back to a legitimate source doesn’t get folded into a client’s targeting model just because it would improve a number on a report.
The Trust Problem No Regulation Will Fully Solve
New rules will keep arriving, and they should. But rules written after the fact tend to catch the worst offenders while leaving room for a lot of gray-zone behavior to continue under new paperwork. The companies whose data practices survive this period intact will be the ones whose practices didn’t need to change much when scrutiny arrived, because there was nothing underneath worth hiding, rather than the ones that simply found the smartest way to stay technically compliant.
That is the bar Atlantic Tech says it holds itself to, one its leadership describes as higher than most current regulation actually requires. That standard is built into insight collection at Atlantic Tech from the start, according to the company, rather than retrofitted after the backlash.
What Comes After the Backlash
The data-broker story will keep evolving, and some of the companies caught in it will simply rebrand and continue. Buyers are getting better at asking the right question. It is not how much data a vendor has. It is how the vendor got that data and what happens if it fails.
Atlantic Tech shaped its business around that solution. As the pushback spreads into more areas of B2B marketing, that solution is becoming a larger part of the sales pitch than it once was, and the company says that’s exactly how it should be.