Anything to keep a lower profile.įar more companies than you realize are collecting as much data as possible about you, your habits, and your relations.

I rented informally and, whenever possible, tried to just pay the landlord my share of utilities in cash. When I lived in the US, I stopped having food delivered, paid in cash, and never signed up for branded credit cards. This experience has made me extremely sensitive about the information I give while making a purchase. I had ordered from Domino's once, but that was enough to link my name to a specific location. Turns out, some fast food chains do a brisk business in reselling customer data. 'Where the fsck did you get all this?!' I demanded. I was shocked that they had so much data on me - I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements (I was poor) up to that point - yet the rep was easily able to list all the places I had resided from college to present, along with a host of off-the-books housemates. It involved those relationship questions ('Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?') that are incredibly creepy. I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. So how do I find out? I'm hoping to also learn to fish in addition to being given the fish. for safety), it's got to have a list of these data aggregators somewhere, so I'm sure some people must know. after all, when a court needs to order that someone's information be purged (for whatever reason, e.g. I'm just looking for as comprehensive a list as possible. I'm not looking for just 1 pointer, though I would appreciate it. My question is, who are these, and (where it is possible to know) whom are they selling to? How can I find out? Surely someone knows, and I'm tired of playing this goose chase where those who don't know just make random guesses as to how the information must be coming from some some public records, and those who do know say hardly anything beyond 'you have to know where to look'. Someone (or a few) hidden underneath has to be doing the heavy-lifting of scraping people's data from sketchy sources and selling them to third-party companies while staying hidden. is not in some government agency's public record, and regardless, surely there's no way that hundreds of companies are repeating each others' work over and over again when they could just buy the information from someone. I'm pretty darn sure that some of the personal information I can find online on MyLife, Intelius, InstantCheckmate, Spokeo, etc. The usual useless BS is 'oh, these companies get it from governmental public records'. Please excuse the frustrated tone the 'secrecy' all over the internet about the whole issue has been driving me insane.

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