Opt Out from Data Brokers

Intro

Data brokers are businesses that consumers don’t directly interact with, but that buy and sell information about consumers from other businesses. For example, if a person signs up for a dating app, a data broker may buy all recent sign ups of that dating app from the app developer and sell the information to a gym that is looking to target potential new customers. The data broker does not have a direct relationship with the person, or any other consumer who signed up for the dating app, but they sell that information to a third party (the gym owner) who is looking for new customers.

"People search sites", operated by data brokers, represent an immense privacy risk to the majority of Americans. For many, sensitive personal information such as your address, phone number, email, and age is a simple internet search away. While there is unfortunately no federal regulation in place to protect your data, many of these companies will remove your information from their public databases upon request.

If you live in California then the California Consumer Privacy Act is consequential. It reserves the right for any California resident to request that any business delete one's personal information among other things.

How this process works

1. Go to a given data vendor website.
2. Search for yourself (your name, phone number, etc.)
3. If you are listed, make note of this. Save any relevant detail
   • URL to their "profile" of you
   • sometimes it will have an ID number for you
4. Request that the information is removed. All of these companies have created some route for requesting your data to be unlisted/deleted.
5. Sometimes you will be listed twice, based on different addresses. If that's the case, submit multiple requests to remove.

My Spreadsheet

I recommend keeping a list or spreadsheet so that you can check off a data broker once you verify they removed your information. My Privacy Audit Spreadsheet is set up this way. I've combined lists of data brokers and you can track your progress. Make a copy and get started. You should be able to get a large part of this done in an afternoon.

Paid Opt Out Services

• EasyOptOuts
• Permission Slip by Consumer Reports
• DeleteMe
• PrivacyDuck
• Aura
• Paper Karma

TLDR. The most important data vendors to opt out from:

These are some of the bigger data vendors and, in some cases, opting out from the one also opts you out of their many subsidiaries.

• Spokeo - out-out link
• Mylife - opt-out link - email [email protected] to ask them to remove profile; they may ask for identification
• Radaris - how to remove; requires making an acct; there are reports that they do not fulfill opt-out requests
• Whitepages - Search, opt-out link
• Intelius - Search, opt-out link
• BeenVerified - Search, opt-out link
• Acxiom - opt-out link
• Infotracer - Search, opt-out link
• Lexis Nexis - opt-out link
• TruePeopleSearch - opt-out link
• USPhoneBook - search & opt out
• Thats them - search, opt out
• Dataveria - Search, Opt-Out
• PublicDataUSA - Search, Opt-Out
• CheckPeople (Search, select Remove Record to opt-out)
• ClustrMaps (Search, Opt-Out)
• PeekYou (Search, Opt-Out)

Sources:

• Michael Bazzell's Data Removal Guide
• Julia Angwin's 212 Data Brokers
• Big-Ass Data Broker List
• World Privacy Forum's Data Vendors Opt Out List (I found some of this to be out of date)