Most of us have never thought much about data brokers. We know our bank has our account information, our doctor keeps our medical records, and a loyalty program or two may know what we tend to buy. Beyond that, our home address and personal details feel reasonably private—shared with people we trust, on our own terms.
That assumption is overdue for a closer look.
There are over 4,000 companies in a $200 billion industry doing exactly one thing: collecting every detail they can find about you and selling it to whoever's willing to pay. Your name, address, phone number, family connections, estimated income, health details, and daily routines are compiled into detailed profiles—without your knowledge or consent. These companies are called data brokers, and your personal information is their product.
Recent events have made the stakes hard to overlook. Law enforcement in Minnesota documented a case where a suspect was found with a written list of people-search websites in his vehicle, along with notes on which ones were free and what personal data each one displayed [1]. Those same sites—Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages, and others—include your information too, and they'll sell it to anyone with a credit card.
What Data Brokers Actually Know About You
People-search sites are just the visible tip of a much larger industry. The profiles data brokers build typically include your full name, current and previous addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, age, marital status, family members' names, education history, employment, estimated income, political leanings, health information, and location data—drawn from public records, social media, loyalty programs, and smartphone apps.
Scammers purchase these profiles to target seniors with Medicare fraud schemes, fake health insurance offers, and investment pitches designed to look legitimate. Robocalls that somehow know your name aren't a coincidence—your phone number and personal details were purchased in advance. Identity thieves can use the same data to open lines of credit in your name, often going undetected for months. And your home address, paired with information about your family and routine, is available to virtually anyone willing to spend a few dollars on the right site.
Taking Back Control
Doing it Yourself
You can contact data broker sites directly and request removal—it's free, and it's your legal right, depending on where you live. The challenge is scale. There are hundreds of these companies, each with its own opt-out process, its own timeline, and a tendency to quietly relist your information weeks after you've had it taken down. Privacy experts estimate that managing even just the major brokers requires 10 to 15 hours upfront, plus continuous monitoring to catch what reappears. For most people, that's simply not sustainable.
Letting Incogni Do the Work
That's why we recommend Incogni. You fill out one short form, one time. From there, Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf, uses applicable privacy laws to compel compliance, and monitors for when your information reappears—sending removal requests automatically when it does. A real-time dashboard shows you exactly which companies have your data and what's been done about it.
No service can eliminate every trace of your information from the internet—and no honest one would promise that. What Incogni will do is steadily reduce what's available for purchase about you, making you harder to find, harder to target, and harder to defraud.
For anyone living on a fixed income who has spent a lifetime carefully protecting what they've built, that kind of ongoing protection is worth a great deal.
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