What Are Data Brokers?

Have you seen ads from your favorite YouTube vloggers about companies that remove your information from data brokers? And have you ever wondered what data brokers are? Simply put, they are companies that collect information about you (like your email address and phone number) and sell it. Some of them only sell your information to other companies, like marketing firms. Another type of data broker is people search sites. These are open to anyone in the general public, as long as they can pay for it. A third type is credit reporting agencies, the companies that collect your financial information to determine what kind of loans and credit cards you can get. In other words, these companies make money by selling information about you to someone else.

Where did data brokers come from?

In 1956, a data analytics company now known as Fair Isaac Corporation created mathematical formulas to try to predict consumer behavior and who would be less of a financial risk. Fair Isaac provided these formulas to credit reporting agencies, who in turn used this information to report to financial companies. Banks, mortgage lenders, and credit card companies used the results to determine if you can get a credit card, mortgage, or loan. (This same company later created the FICO score, which is still used today.)

Another factor is the state of Florida and the auto insurance industry in the 1990s. When auto insurance companies wanted information about driving records, they often hired contractors who would get the records from the state. Driving records were crucial in determining insurances rates.

None of this would have been possible without computers to calculate the formulas and process tremendous amounts of data. The key was distributed computing – that is, having multiple computers working on one problem at the same time. This provided the power and speed to process everything more quickly than computers in the past ever could. It also made it easier to analyze reports from different places and combine them to get a more detailed profile of individual consumers.

The more information that companies got about individuals, the more it became easier to sell goods and services to them. But who was taking care of the information – and where was it going?

Why hasn’t Congress outlawed them?

In 1996, LexisNexis, a famous law database company, created a service called P-Trak. It was intended for attorneys who needed to track down potential witnesses to a crime or potential clients for their services. But P-Trak also included people’s Social Security numbers – which they got from a credit-reporting agency called TransUnion. This inspired an anonymous person to create a chain email (the 1990s version of a viral post) that encouraged everyone to call LexisNexis to have their information removed.

LexisNexis did remove the ability to look up Social Security numbers in June 1996, but that email still kept travelling around the internet. In October of the same year, three US senators wrote to the Federal Trade Commission and asked for an investigation.

LexisNexis joined forces with other data brokers and credit reporting agencies and formed a trade association called the Individual Reference Services Group, or IRSG. By the time the FTC started having hearings, the IRSG had published their own set of guidelines for their industry. They promised to keep people’s information safe and that they were capable of regulating themselves.

In December 1997, the FTC sent a letter to Congress recommending letting data brokers follow their own guidelines. The FTC also said that any further legislation was not needed. Since that time, there have been a few changes. Some states, like California and New Jersey, have stricter privacy laws than others.

How do you take your info back?

You can contact these companies individually and ask them to remove your info, but this would take a very long time. The Privacy Rights Clearninghouse lists 750 data brokers in the U.S. alone. The digital marketing company WebFX estimates that there are over 4000 of data broker companies worldwide.

Instead, you can pay for a professional service that will contact data brokers on your behalf and file takedown notices for you. They will help remove your info from all of these companies (except credit reporting agencies like TransUnion). The big three are Incogni, Aura, and DeleteMe.

Incogni

Incogni is part of the same company that owns NordVPN and Surfshark. Certain plans will allow you to make an unlimited amount of customized removal requests.

Aura

Aura bundles many services together. In addition to removing your info, they also offer the ability to monitor your credit, your financial accounts, and to alert you if your address appears in public records. It also includes its own VPN, antivirus app, and a password manager.

DeleteMe

DeleteMe is a simple, no-frills service. It does not have all the features of Aura, but it will allow you to remove an unlimited amount of names and email addresses. Their website displays a very long list of the data broker websites that they monitor.

When you open an account with one of these companies, you must provide a phone number, your address, and your legal name. Later, you can add additional phone numbers and email addresses. The more information you give the company, the easier it will be for them to locate your profiles on different websites.

After comparing the different features of these services, I decided to get an account with Incogni. The next day, I opened my Incogni dashboard and found 130 pending takedown requests and 156 takedown requests that had been completed. Incogni also showed me an alert that said “We found multiple records that might belong to you. Please identify and select the ones that best match your profile.” They showed me different profiles from various people search websites that had names that were similar to mine. Each profile also displayed an age and physical address. Most of the profiles were not connected to me. But some clearly were, paired with records that looked as though they belonged to my relatives, both living and deceased.

Yes, these services cost money, but keeping your home address, your finances, and other personal info out of the public eye is worth it. Plus, you can almost always find a discount.