But they're leaving money on the table if they don't resell all the data they can legally sell. Now obviously they got most of their revenue by annoying the heck out of debtors right up to the legal limit. I can give you one very specific answer in that my late father decades ago worked in IT for a collections agency and one way that biz works is they pay a fixed amount to buy some companies 120+ day accounts receivable file (the feds and every state highly regulates this and its highly variable and complicated, but this is the simplified version.) and this gave them a vast pile of records and legal ability to collect the debt. The sheer number and diversity of data collection points - and their increasing necessity to participate in the digital economy - makes opting out orders-of-magnitude more difficult. She has to shed nearly every piece of her modern identity - reconfigure apps, wipe her phone/laptop/tablet, stop using sites that geolocate via IP, and halt nearly all interactions with the modern economy - at significant social cost. In this brave new world, though, her ex can track her with the utmost ease. And she definitely didn't need to take her life in her hands to order a cheese pizza. She could continue to maintain a reasonable subset of her professional and social relationships. In your phone book world, she didn't need to dramatically alter her existence to stay safe. And they're everywhere.Ĭonsider the following hypothetical: A battered wife flees her husband and takes shelter in a shared house run by a women's organization. There's absolutely no such choice, though, from these modern, private data collectors. The phone book is an opt-in system, with the ability to remain "unlisted". "Do we forget that not long ago everyone's name, address, and phone number was published in the phone book " In this new economy, you are always the product. So I'm afraid your search for a canonical list of data sources is ultimately fruitless. Anything to keep a lower profile.įar more companies than you realize are collecting as much data as possible about you, your habits, and your relations. I rented informally and, whenever possible, tried to just pay the landlord my share of utilities in cash. When I lived in the US, I stopped having food delivered, paid in cash, and never signed up for branded credit cards. This experience has made me extremely sensitive about the information I give while making a purchase. I had ordered from Domino's once, but that was enough to link my name to a specific location. Turns out, some fast food chains do a brisk business in reselling customer data. "Where the fsck did you get all this?!" I demanded. I was shocked that they had so much data on me - I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements (I was poor) up to that point - yet the rep was easily able to list all the places I had resided from college to present, along with a host of off-the-books housemates. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?") that are incredibly creepy. I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. So how do I find out? I'm hoping to also learn to fish in addition to being given the fish. for safety), it's got to have a list of these data aggregators somewhere, so I'm sure some people must know. after all, when a court needs to order that someone's information be purged (for whatever reason, e.g. I'm just looking for as comprehensive a list as possible. I'm not looking for just 1 pointer, though I would appreciate it. My question is, who are these, and (where it is possible to know) whom are they selling to? How can I find out? Surely someone knows, and I'm tired of playing this goose chase where those who don't know just make random guesses as to how the information must be coming from some some public records, and those who do know say hardly anything beyond "you have to know where to look". Someone (or a few) hidden underneath has to be doing the heavy-lifting of scraping people's data from sketchy sources and selling them to third-party companies while staying hidden. is not in some government agency's public record, and regardless, surely there's no way that hundreds of companies are repeating each others' work over and over again when they could just buy the information from someone. I'm pretty darn sure that some of the personal information I can find online on MyLife, Intelius, InstantCheckmate, Spokeo, etc. The usual useless BS is "oh, these companies get it from governmental public records". Please excuse the frustrated tone the "secrecy" all over the internet about the whole issue has been driving me insane.
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