Why Retirees Need to Opt-Out of Data Brokers—The Sooner, the Better

Sponsored By: Incogni

“Data broker” is not a term that comes up very often in everyday life, but not knowing what data brokers are can definitely affect your everyday life in ways you might never expect. Cutting right to the chase, data brokers are businesses that turn a profit by collecting, organizing, and selling consumers’ personal information.

Doesn’t sound so bad? Read on.

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What kinds of personal information do data brokers deal in?

When you think of “personal information”, you might think about your name, age, address, phone number, and so on. It certainly is that, but it’s a lot more besides. Data brokers regularly sell information like:

• Email addresses
• IP (Internet Protocol) addresses
• Marital status
• Family information (spouse, children, parents, etc.)
• Education history
• Employment history
• Income
• Purchase history
• Browsing habits
• Location history
• Voter registration
• Political affiliations
• Social media profiles
• Sexual orientation
• Court records (divorce, liens, bankruptcy)
• Criminal records (including mugshots)
• Property records (including valuations and sale prices)
• And much, much more.

It’s unpleasant to think about this kind of information being made available online. But, unfortunately, it’s worse than that: this information isn’t just sitting there somewhere online; it’s actively being marketed to both individuals and other businesses.

What are the risks of having personal information on the market?

The fact that all this personal information is doing the rounds online becomes a problem because of the people and businesses that are only too willing to buy it. From legitimate (legal) marketing companies to individual scammers and cybercriminals, and even organized crime groups.

Some data brokers have even been caught selling packages of personal data (the personal information of thousands, even millions, of Americans) in the form of targeted lists focused on, for example, “elderly and vulnerable Americans.”

All manner of crimes depend on the availability of personal information. Carefully crafted scam pretexts, for example, absolutely depend on the scammer knowing enough about you, your background, family, and associates to create compelling background stories.

Say a scammer looks you up on a so-called people-search site (or people-finder site or reverse phone lookup site: all different names for this kind of data broker). There, they might find that you recently sold a property (downsizing for your retirement, for example). You’ve just become a target: people who have recently sold property are often “cash rich,” at least temporarily, and criminals see that as an opportunity.

That same people-search site may also give them your name, date of birth, phone number, address, email address, maybe even your Social Security number (although this is both illegal and rare). In short, they’ll have everything they need to approach you with a scam that they’ve designed specifically for you, one that’s very difficult to resist. This could be anything from a call from someone claiming to be from your bank to a too-good-to-be-true investment opportunity popping up in your letterbox one day.

The dangers are real and, if anything, become more serious as you settle into your retirement. The most effective way to disrupt these criminals’ operations is to deprive them of your personal information. Once that’s gone, they don’t even know you exist, let alone where you live, how much cash you have on hand, or your relatives’ and former coworkers’ names.

How do data brokers operate?

To do that, we need to drill down into how data brokers ply their trade. From there, you need only stop the brokers from collecting and disseminating your personal data, and you should see drastic reductions in nuisances like spam and robocalls as well as serious dangers like stalking, identity theft, and elaborate fraud schemes.

In short, data brokers hoover up personal information from everywhere they can find it. Public records are a great source for them: court records, marriage and divorce records, licenses (professional, driver’s, hunting, gun), property records, and more—much more. They also buy ready-made datasets from other brokers and directly from the companies that collected the data from you, like online retailers, social media sites, and so on.

The “value” data brokers bring to the market is the convenient way they package up an individual’s data into a handy profile and then all those profiles into “themed” datasets. This means that if you can stop your profile from appearing in these datasets, the problem is essentially solved—no one’s likely to visit scattered courthouses piecing together your public record.

Your options for dealing with the data broker problem

So what you need to do is:

1. Get your profile taken down from any data brokers that are selling it now, and
2. Make sure they don’t just create new profiles for you as time goes on (because this is something data brokers tend to do, even if unintentionally).

And there are two ways you can go about this.

Opting out of data brokers manually

The only advantage this first approach has is that it’s “free” (unless you value your time). It involves you researching data brokers in your region, state, or area and then reaching out to each one individually to request that they remove your profile from their databases. That takes care of number 1, above.

To take care of number 2—keeping your profile off these sites and away from these brokers—your only option is to monitor those data brokers that you can (mainly people-search sites) and just blindly re-submit removal (opt-out) requests on a set schedule (say, 3–4 times a year) to those you can’t.

The complications with this approach are many, though. Coming up with a list of data brokers that are likely to even have your personal information is no easy task and will require a lot of research. Then there’s the reaching out to each broker part: each data broker has its own required method for the submission of these requests, and some are pretty onerous, to say the least.

Some data brokers will simply provide you with an online form to fill out, while others will require you to email or even call them. Some will insist that you mail them a physical form. Generally, there are many hoops to jump through, and it can easily take hundreds of hours to do just one round of opt-out (or data-removal) requests. That’s one round out of the 3 or 4 you should be doing each year.

There’s a better way.

Subscribing to a data-removal service

Or you could sign up for a dedicated data-removal service like Incogni. Incogni has put systems in place that deduce which data brokers are most likely to hold your data and then automatically send out data-removal requests on your behalf. These systems are designed to jump through each data broker’s hoops to make sure your requests are valid.

Incogni covers 420+ data brokers in this way, including people-search sites and the more shadowy brokers that don’t have public-facing search engines, preferring to deal in larger datasets behind the scenes, selling directly to other businesses (including people-search sites). The process couldn’t be simpler: you sign up and pay for a subscription (starting from $7.99 per month), give Incogni permission to act on your behalf (so that data brokers can’t question the validity of your requests), and that’s it—just sit back and watch Incogni work.

If you find that your personal information is being bought and sold by data brokers not covered by Incogni’s standard plans, or that it’s up on a website that doesn’t belong to a data broker, then an Incogni Unlimited plan might be for you. These plans give you the option to submit specific links to your information to Incogni’s privacy experts, who’ll then do their best to have it removed for you.

Results vary, but Incogni has already removed personal data from 2,000+ unique domains this way, and that figure only continues to grow.

Perhaps most importantly, Incogni doesn’t stop at one-off take-downs when it comes to its automated removals, rather re-submitting requests on a regular basis to make sure your data stays removed going forward. An exclusive offer for AMAC readers: Save 55% on any annual plan. Just enter the code AMAC at checkout.

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