There are a lot of things I don’t like about the modern Internet, but near the top are the various data broker websites that publish large volumes of personal information — name, addresses, phone, places of employment, voting history, criminal history, etc — about people without their consent. In the United States there is limited/to no regulation of these sites, so they operate without any real oversight. In practice, these sites facilitate harassment, doxxing, identity theft, and discrimination.
Why Data Brokers are a Problem
They belong to that special class of websites that just feels slimy and predatory. Browsing through the sites is a good case study in anti-patterns and dark patterns and how they are deployed in websites. Surveying a handful of data brokers/people search sites will almost certainly showcase opaque opt-out processes, frequently changing opt-out URLs, unnecessary “searching” animations (we all know they aren’t actually compiling dossiers at the time of search), sensationalized enticements to subscribe, excessive Captchas, etc.
The Opt-Out Nightmare
Aside from the core issue of publishing personal information without regard for the consequences, the worst part is the lack of standardized opt-out process. Each site has their own process and with hundreds of sites, removing yourself from these sites is an arduous undertaking. I’m not sure that it works all that well, but at least the telemarketing industry has the DoNotCall Registry. It would be great to see something like that for people search site.
My Experience: Fighting the Data Hydra
I’ve worked on this a lot in the past and had successfully — or so I thought — removed myself from most of these sites. I made extensive use of the “Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List” and Michael Bazzell’s “Data Privacy Workbook.” I did it all myself because I didn’t want to rely on the auxiliary industry of companies that you can pay to remove your information. In some cases, those companies have deals with data brokers or run data brokers themselves. After the initial work, I put various Google Alerts in place and tried my best to remove my information as it popped up.
The Return of the Data Brokers
Despite putting a significant chunk of time into it and being at least somewhat vigilant about how my information appears online, I recently found out that my information was once again present again. I had previously opted out of several of them:
- Radaris
- Veripages
- Intellius
- Infotracer
There was also a whole batch of new ones:
- BackgroundChreck.run
- Clay.earth
- Councilon
- Dataveria
- GovernmentRegistry.org
- Infover
- Numlookup
- People-background-check
- Pub360
- Verecor
- Vericora
- Virtory
Opting out what the usual mess of broken web forms and stonewalling, but I eventually had success — at least until the next round appears.