Payas Parab is a data scientist with deep experience working across the digital advertising, real estate tech, and e-commerce sectors. His work has focused on building data pipelines, designing identity graphs, and addressing real-world challenges around privacy, attribution, and fraud detection. He has led projects involving large-scale consumer datasets and has advised organizations on how to use data responsibly while protecting individual privacy at multi-billion dollar technology companies.
Payas has worked with a wide range of data providers and analytics platforms, giving him direct insight into how personal data is collected, matched, and monetized. He has helped organizations navigate legal gray areas, including the use of health, location, and purchasing data. His recent work includes consulting on the ethical use of location data for public policy and developing fraud detection tools for creator platforms.
Drawing from these experiences, Payas is now focused on research that examines the less visible layers of the data economy. His goal is to bring practical insight into how data flows behind the scenes and to contribute frameworks that support ethical, transparent, and accountable data use.
Project: The Hidden Costs of the Secondary Data Economy is a research project focused on how personal data is collected, sold, and reused by third-party vendors that operate outside the public eye. While much attention is given to major technology platforms, there is a growing ecosystem of data firms that support them by aggregating, cleaning, and distributing consumer information. These companies often work behind the scenes and are not held to the same transparency or accountability standards. This project will study how these vendors operate, what types of data they collect, and how their services support targeted advertising, health analytics, and commercial profiling. It will draw from technical documentation, interviews, and industry practices to assess the risks and incentives that drive the secondary data market. The research builds on frameworks like surveillance capitalism but shifts focus to the hidden infrastructure that enables it. The goal is to help policymakers and technologists better understand this part of the data economy, identify areas where oversight is lacking, and develop standards that protect individual rights. The project combines industry experience with academic inquiry to address a major blind spot in today’s privacy debates.