MyRecon OSINTHow Data Brokers Collect and Sell Your Personal Data
There is an entire industry built on compiling profiles of ordinary people and selling them — and most of us have never heard of the companies doing it. Understanding how data brokers work is the first step to limiting how much of your life they can package up.
Who data brokers are
A data broker is a company whose business is collecting personal information about people from many sources, combining it into detailed profiles, and selling access to those profiles. Their customers include advertisers, marketers, background-check services, insurers, and "people search" websites — the sites that pop up with your name, age, and past addresses when you search yourself. You never signed up with them, and you probably cannot name a single one, yet many hold a startlingly complete picture of you.
Where they get your data
- Public records — voter rolls, property and court records, business filings, and licences.
- Online activity — tracking pixels and cookies that follow you across websites and apps.
- Purchases and loyalty programs — shopping histories sold or shared by retailers.
- Apps and services — data harvested through permissions you granted, often buried in a privacy policy.
- Other brokers — they buy and sell datasets among themselves, so one leak spreads everywhere.
How the profiles are built
Individually, these sources are fragments. The broker's real product is correlation: matching records by name, email, phone number, and address to merge them into a single profile. That profile can include your relatives, your estimated income, your interests, your approximate location history, and inferences the broker guesses about you — inferences that are sometimes wrong but still sold as fact.
Why this matters. These profiles power targeted scams, make identity theft easier, expose home addresses to strangers, and can influence decisions about you that you never see. The information is also a goldmine for anyone trying to impersonate or locate you.
How to see what's out there
Start by searching your own name, along with your city, on a search engine — the people-search sites that appear are broker listings. Then audit the accounts and breaches tied to your email and usernames; the more of your data that is already public, the easier it is for brokers to enrich their profile of you. MyRecon's tools help with that self-audit, and our guide on checking for breaches covers the exposure side.
How to opt out and limit exposure
- Opt out of the big brokers directly. Most operate a removal process; search "[broker name] opt out." It is tedious but effective for the largest listings.
- Use privacy rights where you have them. Laws such as the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA/CPRA in California give you the right to request deletion of your data.
- Reduce new collection. Limit app permissions, decline non-essential cookies, and avoid loyalty schemes that monetise your purchases.
- Shrink your public footprint so there is less to compile — see our full digital-footprint guide.
- Repeat periodically. Brokers re-list data over time, so opting out once is not permanent.
The realistic goal
You will probably never remove yourself from every broker — the industry is large and constantly re-compiling. But you do not need perfection. Removing yourself from the biggest people-search sites and cutting off new collection dramatically reduces how easily a stranger, scammer, or stalker can find and profile you. Even partial control is a real improvement over doing nothing.