Data Brokers: Getting All Up In Yo Ass, On The Downlow

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Mon Mar 6 13:59:07 PST 2017


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!


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list