Your name, address and secrets are being sold for pennies

“Kim, I don’t want to sound dumb, but what do data brokers do exactly, and why should I care if they are selling my name or address? I’m sure that was already exposed in some data breach.” — Kerry in Harrisburg, PA

Kerry, that is not a dumb question. It is THE question. Most people have no clue these companies exist, and that is exactly how the brokers like it.

A data broker is a company you never signed up with, quietly building a massive file on you. Your name, home address, phone, income, the meds you googled at 2 a.m., where your phone sleeps every night. The big brokers keep more than 3,000 facts on a single person. Think about that for a sec.

You hand that info over every day and every single time you pick up your phone. They scrape it from public records, apps, loyalty cards, travels, car rides, web trails and more. Then they sell this file on you to anyone who wants it.

🏷️ You are the product, not the customer

You go cheap. Brokers buy one record for about a twentieth of a cent and resell it for 50 cents or more. That is a 1,000 times markup on your life. Roughly 5,000 of these firms operate worldwide, feeding advertisers, insurers, background-check sites, landlords, even scammers and spammers who use your real details to make their fake calls sound legit. 

Last year, breaches tied to brokers cost Americans an estimated $21 billion. 

Why care if it is just your name and address?

Because your address in the wrong hands is how stalkers find people. It is how a “Grandma, I am in jail” call gets your grandkid’s name right. It is how your home and car insurance quietly creeps up. 

Your name is not the boring part. It’s the key that unlocks everything else.

🔒 How to yank yourself off the shelf

You can opt out yourself. It is free. It is also brutal. Only 3% of people who try ever fully succeed, because brokers bury the forms in legal spaghetti, and your file crawls right back within months as they re-scrape public records.

So here is what I do. I use Incogni. It contacts data brokers for you, uses privacy laws to legally demand deletion, then keeps resending the requests every 60 days so you stay gone. It is the only service Deloitte has independently checked.* 

Plans start around $7 a month, and using this link saves you 60%. BTW, I get no kickbacks or residuals if you sign up.

Kerry, sign one form, and take yourself off the market now. You are a person, not a product.

📩 Send this to someone who still says, “I’ve got nothing to hide” (they’ve got plenty to lose).