After harvesting your personally identifiable information (PII) from the internet, data brokers sell it to the highest bidder. What the buyer does with it is up to them. To avoid becoming a victim of a scam or identity theft, step one is to keep your personal information off the internet. To do so, some people opt for automatic data removal, like the one offered in select Allstate Identity Protection plans. Others go at it themselves, locking down their privacy settings, requesting search results get removed, and creating ongoing Google alerts.
Ever hear the phrase, “Hold your cards close to your chest?” It’s an old gambling proverb warning players to keep their cards away from the prying eyes of cheats—a reminder to keep information private and away from anyone who might take advantage of it.
If only protecting your personally identifiable information (PII) were still that simple. Today, “holding your cards close” means reviewing privacy settings on every online account, managing several different cookie preferences, and paying attention to how websites collect and store your information.
And if you want that grocery store discount, member rewards, or free shipping on your next online order, you’ll likely be asked to hand over some of your personal details to get it.
The reality is, our personal information has value. For everyday consumers, sharing it can mean convenience or savings. For data brokers, collecting and selling it (sometimes to businesses, sometimes to unknown third parties) is a profit model.
Either way, so much wheeling and dealing makes all of us vulnerable. The more your information circulates, the greater the chance it could be misused. And until stronger consumer protection laws are in place, much of the responsibility falls on individuals to protect their data.
What is a data broker?
Data brokers are companies that collect and analyze online data to build digital profiles of real people.
For example, a data broker might gather your name, age, address, social media accounts, and shopping habits. With this information, they can build a profile of someone who’s 30, lives in a wealthy neighborhood, shops at online resale stores, and uses Instagram often. A company selling trendy vintage-style coats could then pay the broker to target this ideal customer directly. The watchdog group EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) notes that data brokers can collect information like your:
Name
Address
Phone number
Email address
Birthdate
Political party
Job
Alma mater
Levels of education
Car
Home ownership status
Real estate holdings
Relatives
Children
Salary
Shopping preferences (where you shop, what you buy, how you pay)
Credit status
Our online behavior
Social media details
EPIC also warns that “thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and wearables, data brokers collect and sell real-time location data.” In other words, where you are and when is up for sale, too.
How do data brokers get your information?
Data brokers can legally collect vast amounts of personal data from a variety of sources, including:
Public records: Names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, property ownership, court filings, and more
Commercial sources: Retail companies, credit card providers, and other business partners
Online tracking: Cookies, social media activity, online surveys, and browsing behavior
Can scammers buy your information from data brokers?
Data brokers act as middlemen, collecting PII and selling it to third parties. Because they’re not involved in how the data is used, they often don’t know who’s buying it or what the buyer plans to do with it.
If scammers get access to your information, the consequences can range from annoying to dangerous. With just your phone number and the name of your mortgage company, a scammer could send a fake message like: “This is JP Morgan Mortgage Company. Click here to lower your interest rate.” If you click, they know you’ve taken the bait, and they’ll keep coming back. In more serious cases, your privacy, creditworthiness, or even safety could be at risk.
That said, data broker operations are legal in most places, though often loosely regulated. (In recent years, states like California, Texas, Oregon, and Vermont have passed data broker registration laws that require brokers to identify themselves to state regulators and the public.)
But not all data use is harmful. Businesses use brokered data for market research, credit scoring, and more, in the name of helping tailor their services. The real issue is transparency: most people don’t know what’s being collected, who’s buying it, or how it’s being used.
How to hide your information from data brokers
There’s a two-step process to hide your information from data brokers. The first step is to change your current account privacy settings so that your information won’t be shared without your permission going forward.
The second step involves scrubbing what information already exists online (If a do-it-yourself method is too daunting, try an automated data removal feature, like the one included in select Allstate Identity Protection plans.)
Change your privacy settings
First, make a list of all the websites and apps where you have accounts. Go site by site, app by app, and log into each of your accounts. Head to the privacy settings and disable (or limit) data sharing.
Here’s a tip if you can’t remember all the apps and sites with which you have accounts: If your browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) autofills your usernames and passwords, it keeps a running list of these. Find that list in your browser settings, visit each account, and reset the privacy settings or delete the account altogether.
To see which additional apps you may have, you can also look at the account where you download your apps (Google Play or the App Store, for instance) to see what you’ve signed up for and what subscriptions you may have. Last, you can check your bank statements for subscription payments.
Then, don't forget to set your social and gaming accounts to private. Whether you prefer TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Roblox, or others, what you post becomes public information. Go to your account privacy settings to restrict any social media or gaming accounts you have.
Know that deleting apps from your devices or deleting site logins from your browser’s autofill list is not enough to hide from data brokers. You must log in to these accounts and formally delete your profile or posts.
Control your cookie preferences
Part of locking down your privacy settings includes limiting what the account tracks and shares with third parties when you are on their site or app.
Opting for only “cookies” that are necessary for navigating their site or app is the most secure setting. On each website you visit, toggle the cookie preferences to the opt-out setting.
Be selective with new sign-ups
If you’ve signed up for any membership, you likely traded in some amount of privacy to score perks (like discounts). Many, if not most, businesses will send you marketing messages unless you uncheck the opt-in box.
Limit or opt out of memberships that open you up to marketing material. Review this setting as you revisit your account privacy settings to prevent the company from selling or sharing your information.
Removing your data from the internet
Whether you choose a DIY approach or a subscription-based service like Allstate Identity Protection’s data removal feature, focus your efforts on two key areas:
Start with search engines
According to Search Engine Journal, Google remains the world’s top search engine, with a claim to more than 91 percent of the market. Given that, it is the best place to start scrubbing your information off the internet.
According to Google’s support pages, you can remove PII such as your address, phone number, and/or email address; confidential government identification, such as your Social Security or tax ID numbers or your resident registration or resident identity card number; bank account or credit card numbers; images of your handwritten signature or an ID doc; highly personal, restricted, and official records, like medical records.
To scrub your information off Google, try these three methods:
Enter your name in the Google search bar. When the results crop up, hover over the three small vertical dots next to each listing (look beside the website URL). Click the “remove results” option that appears, then follow the prompts to remove the content.
Go to Google’s “results about you.” Follow the prompts, and Google will crawl the web for sites on which you appear. It then creates a running list of these sites—and what information they reveal—for you to review. Follow the prompts to “request to remove” the results.
Set up a Google alert to monitor your PII. When your PII gets posted anew, Google will email you, and you can follow the steps to have it removed.
Search Engine Journal named a handful of other outlets with powerful search engines. The global list, ranked in order after Google, includes: YouTube, Amazon, Microsoft’s Bing, TikTok, Baidu, and Yandex.
Remove yourself from “people search” sites
In decades past, people could ask the phone company to remove their listing from the phone book or to mark their address and phone number as “unlisted.” Today, the equivalent is removing yourself from so-called “people search” sites.
Get removed when you:
Enter the name of the people search site and the words “opt out” in a browser search bar. Follow the linked results.
Visit the support or help section of the people search site. (Look for links at the bottom of the site’s home page.) Click on “remove my info” and follow the prompts.
The future of data brokers
Data brokers aren’t going away. While they serve legitimate business purposes, the lack of transparency around how your data is collected and sold remains a growing concern.
That said, the landscape is evolving. Governments are enforcing stricter privacy regulations, and tech companies are developing tools that give you greater control over your personal information.
By adjusting your privacy settings, limiting what you share, and removing existing data, you can “hold your cards close” in today’s digital world—and keep your information where it belongs: with you.