What makes you think your data has even been sold at all? Most likely a majority of those companies are just resellers of TransUnion, Equifax, or Experian. The 3 big credit bureaus. So while incogni sent then requests the smaller companies may host no data of yours, just the other 3.
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Money is clearly being made using our personal aggregated data. Search for "data brokerage market", and you'll stumble upon articles and PR along the lines of "Data Brokers Market Estimated to Reach US$ 462.4 billion by 2031", for example: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/08/01/2489563/0/en/Data-Brokers-Market-Estimated-to-Reach-US-462-4-billion-by-2031-TMR-Report.html
I'm aware that money is made. Most of the time companies are buying API feeds of data from the big 3. So unless someone specifically looked you up, then I am saying your data is probably just sitting in their databases.
Let me take a real life example here. Let's say I'm worried about SIM-swapping schemes, and I go and get a phone number for my banking, and my banking only. If THAT number suddenly shows up in the midst of the 123+ so data brokers, then clearly, me getting a phone number dedicated to avoiding SIM-swapping, is useless. That's one of the use cases. Makes sense?
Anyone know if incogni is legit?
It's much better to go through the list of data brokers manually and submit your information twice a year, if you have the time. Like doing taxes, but for privacy.
I'm not sure but it is a good question and a good project if none already exists.
Looking at work history from employees of these companies on linkedin we might discover more.
I used to work for a data broker. The main problem here is that profiles are created and compiled from public data. There aren't any P.I.s at work here... Just massive amounts of data dumps that anyone could access. If you include PII data like socials, then there are limitations on who can view it.... But not really that hard to circumvent. A human could not possibly compile profiles from terrabytes of public data, but our programmers could.... And this is the real problem. much of this data was public before current computer logic existed and no one foresaw the huge privacy implications.
For my company, only requests that come from persons living in California were honored....and only the person could request removal, not a 3rd party on behalf of the person. Sux.
And FYI, any searches for certain people would be reported to the authorities.... Like if you searched Donald Trump with SSN Inclusion, we had to report it to secret service.
You can go to inteltechniques and peruse their data removal guide. That is basically a massive list of brokers / sites that may have your data.
Yeah, I have considered doing this and I just don't have the time and patience for it. I currently pay $20/year for easyoptouts and it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I believe they check back and scrape periodically throughout the year and it's very effective.
The only concern with easyoptouts is they will send requests to brokers they are not sure of, which can lead to data brokers who had no data on you now being sent it. This is not a specific problem for them, as other services do this as well.
I'd like to reverse engineer, where they get the data from, in the first place. But thanks for the great resource!!