https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802068 Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc? 151 points by mehrdadn 5 hours ago | hide | past | web | 124 comments | favorite Please excuse the frustrated tone; the "secrecy" all over the internet about the whole issue has been driving me insane. The usual useless BS is "oh, these companies get it from governmental public records". Yeah, right. I'm pretty darn sure that some of the personal information I can find online on MyLife, Intelius, InstantCheckmate, Spokeo, etc. 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. 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. 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". I'm not looking for just 1 pointer, though I would appreciate it. I'm tired of pointer chasing. I'm just looking for as comprehensive a list as possible. It has to exist somewhere... after all, when a court needs to order that someone's information be purged (for whatever reason, e.g. for safety), it's got to have a list of these data aggregators somewhere, so I'm sure some people must know. So how do I find out? I'm hoping to also learn to fish in addition to being given the fish. Thank you!