Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Commerce Committee, has sent a letter to over a dozen major brokers as a part of a broader inquiry into the use of consumer data in certain key verticals. Chief analyst at Wikibon, Dave Vellante, discussed this latest Congressional update on the News Desk this week.

Vellante explains that the range of these data collected by these various organizations is incredibly wide. Retailers, for example, track purchase history and social patterns to make better product recommendations, but it gets more complicated when it comes to personal data – social security numbers, net worth, credit card history and other info used by healthcare companies and financial service providers.

Vellante points out that the investigation is not something completely unexpected. It’s almost a recurring event – a decade ago Washington looked into e-mail and put in place anti-spam regulations with the exact same motive: ensuring users’ privacy.

Wikibon’s chief analyst also notes that this latest inquiry is not a reaction to a scandal of some sort, which means that lawmakers have time to take everything into consideration and make the right decisions. Regulators will have to be careful not to veer off from the fine line between protecting consumers’ privacy and denying data brokers’ rights to use information for the benefit of those consumers.

Congress is essentially gunning for a big data audit, and from a large enterprise perspective, this is quite a chore. But Vellante says that it’s not particularly harmful for the companies that will be dragged into this inquiry, especially not from a marketing standpoint.

Going more in depth, Vellante says that we’ll most likely to see changes in non-regulated industries. There are existing rules in place for regulated sectors that may or may not be tweaked as a result of this initiative, but vendors that don’t fall under this category will almost certainly have to change the way they manage consumer data.

See below for Vellante’s full analysis.