Gloo is a platform that more than 30,000 US churches have signed up to, about one in ten, by its own count. In December 2021 The Wall Street Journal reported that Gloo's marketing documents said it held profiles of about 245 million people in the US, built from thousands of data points bought from other companies and gathered through the churches it works with. The documents said it could predict who might have a marriage in trouble, depression or anxiety, or a propensity for drug addiction, so that a church could reach them.
In one model, Gloo bought a list of 30,000 divorced couples from a data provider and worked out what they had in common, such as high credit card spending, recent travel bookings and a low likelihood of managing their health. From those patterns it found more than 33 million married Americans who matched. A report prepared for one church estimated that a quarter of the marriages within five miles might be close to divorce. Gloo said churches never saw names from the bought data. People could submit their name and contact details through its landing pages, and Gloo passed those on to the church.
After the Journal began asking, Gloo said it had stopped using mental health data and changed some of its earlier practices. Wunderman Thompson, the WPP agency it had named as the source of its base file on consumers, ended its contract and asked for its data to be deleted. Gloo would not say where its mental health or addiction data came from.
What it shows
Data bought about you can be used to guess what you never told anyone, such as a marriage in trouble or a struggle with addiction. Here the guesses were sold to churches as a way to find people. The church saw no name until someone filled in one of Gloo's pages, and then it had the name.
For your own record
Ask the companies you deal with whether they pass your data to data brokers or marketing firms, and ask them to stop. A request to see your data covers what they have inferred about you as well as what you gave them.