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.

What Opting Out Can't Do
- It won't stop companies from collecting information in the first place
- You cannot remove records from public, government databases
- it won't stop tracking by apps, ISPs, and online advertisers
- The data economy is designed to leak data.

My Spreadsheet

My Privacy Audit Spreadsheet is a list of data brokers that is formatted so that you can keep track of your progress in this process. Make a copy and get started. You should be able to get a large part of this done in an afternoon.

How this process works

Start with the industry-wide "preference services" like:
- DMAchoice – direct mail opt-out,
- Opt out of pre-screened credit offers,
- Your Ad Choices.
2. Opt out of the biggest data brokers (labeled Highest Priority in the Big Spreadsheet)
3. If you're up for it, spend you're time going further through the list of data brokers, people search sites, etc. and see if you are listed in their system. If so, request they remove it.

Opting Out from a Data Broker

Go to a data vendor's website.
Search for yourself (your name, phone number, etc.)
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
Request that the information is removed. All of these companies have created some route for requesting your data to be unlisted/deleted.
Sometimes you will be listed twice, based on different addresses. If that's the case, submit multiple requests to remove.

Also try searching for your name or phone number in a search engine (Google, DuckDuckGo). This is another strategy for finding websites that have your data for sale.

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)

Paid Opt Out Services

These companies make money by providing a service. However, they provide the illusion of control. The data being sold by data brokers will not all be deleted by any of these companies. When you opt out, the data broker likely unlists the data, making it no longer for sale.