Somewhere in a database you have never seen, maintained by a company you have never heard of, there is a file about you. It contains more information than your doctor, your employer, and your closest friends have combined. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Acxiom — one of the largest data brokers, with information on roughly 700 million consumers worldwide — maintains profiles containing up to 1,500 individual data points per person, and other major brokers operate at a similar scale.
This is not hypothetical. This is the documented reality of an industry that generates over $365 billion annually by collecting, packaging, and selling detailed profiles of nearly every person in the developed world.
Here is what that file contains.
Full legal name, maiden name, previous names, aliases. Date of birth. Social Security number (full or partial). Driver's license number. Current and previous home addresses going back decades. Every phone number you have ever used. Every email address you have ever registered. Your photograph, scraped from social media, professional directories, or public records.
Estimated annual income. Estimated net worth. Credit score range. Mortgage details including lender, amount, and interest rate. Property ownership records. Vehicle registrations. Investment account types (though not specific account numbers). Bankruptcy filings. Tax lien records. Your estimated donation capacity — how much a charity could ask you for based on your financial profile.
Names of your spouse or partner. Names and ages of your children. Names of your parents, siblings, and extended relatives. Marital status and history. Household composition — who lives with you, their ages, and their estimated incomes.
Current employer. Job title. Employment history. Professional licenses. Industry classification. Estimated workplace location. Business ownership records. Corporate officer positions. Professional association memberships.
While HIPAA protects medical records held by your doctor, data brokers build health profiles from other sources. Pharmacy purchases. Health app usage. Fitness tracker data. Searches for medical conditions. Visits to medical facilities (tracked through phone location data). Magazine subscriptions related to health conditions. Purchases of health-related products. Inferred conditions based on purchasing patterns — buying diabetic testing supplies, for example, tells a broker you or someone in your household has diabetes.
Every purchase made with a loyalty card. Online shopping history from retailers that share data. Catalog purchases. Product preferences and brand affinities. Predicted purchasing behavior. Coupon redemption history. Estimated annual spending by category. Whether you shop premium or discount.
GPS coordinates from your smartphone, collected through apps and sold to brokers like Venntel and Gravy Analytics. Where your phone sleeps at night (your home). Where it goes during the day (your workplace). Every store, restaurant, gym, doctor's office, place of worship, and gathering you attend. How fast you drive and how hard you brake, transmitted by your car's telematics system. License plate scans recording everywhere you have driven, captured by camera networks operated by companies like Flock Safety.
Voter registration records including party affiliation. Political donation history (available through FEC records). Inferred political leanings based on media consumption, location data, and purchasing patterns. Religious affiliation inferred from place-of-worship visits or organizational memberships. Estimated positions on social issues based on behavioral data.
Social media profiles and public posts. Professional profiles on LinkedIn. Forum memberships and public comments. Domain name registrations. App usage patterns. Advertising ID linking your behavior across apps and devices. Browser fingerprint identifying your specific device configuration. Wi-Fi network connections revealing locations you frequent.
The most common reaction to seeing this list is: I never gave anyone this information. In most cases, that is correct. Data brokers rarely collect information directly from consumers. Instead, they aggregate data from dozens of indirect sources.
Public records are the foundation. Property deeds, voter registrations, court filings, marriage licenses, business filings, and professional licenses are all publicly available. Data brokers scrape these records systematically and merge them into consumer profiles.
Retailers and service providers sell transaction data. When you use a loyalty card, make a purchase with a credit card, or shop online, that transaction data often flows to data brokers through data-sharing agreements buried in the terms of service you accepted without reading.
Apps harvest your phone. The weather app, the coupon app, the game you downloaded — many of these apps collect your location, device identifiers, and usage patterns and sell them to advertising networks and data brokers. Over 10,000 apps have been identified as harvesting location data for commercial sale.
Your car reports your driving. Connected vehicle services transmit your GPS location, driving behavior, and trip history to the manufacturer, who may share it with insurance companies, data brokers, and law enforcement. Three car manufacturers have been fined a combined $13.76 million for this practice in 2025-2026 alone.
Social media and the open web provide the rest. Public posts, photos, professional profiles, and any content you publish online is scraped, indexed, and incorporated into your broker profile. Clearview AI has built a facial recognition database from billions of photos scraped from social media without consent.
Data brokers do not collect this information out of curiosity. They sell it. The buyers include advertisers who want to target you with ads, insurance companies that want to price your risk, employers who want to screen you before hiring, landlords who want to evaluate your rental application, and government agencies that want to track your movements without obtaining a warrant.
The price of your data varies by use case. A basic marketing profile might sell for a few cents. A detailed background check can cost $20-50. A comprehensive location history suitable for government surveillance can cost thousands. At scale, across billions of profiles, the economics are staggering — a $365 billion annual industry built entirely on information collected from people who never knew they were the product.
The uncomfortable truth: You cannot prevent data collection entirely. Public records are public. Retailers will always collect transaction data. Apps will always seek location access. But you can demand deletion of what has already been collected, and you can reduce future collection by limiting app permissions, disabling your mobile advertising ID, and opting out of connected vehicle data sharing.
Under the CCPA, you have the right to request a copy of all personal information a data broker has collected about you. Under the FCRA, consumer reporting agencies must provide you with a free copy of your file upon request. These disclosure requests reveal exactly what each company knows, where they got it, and who they shared it with.
The process of requesting disclosures from all 37 consumer reporting agencies and hundreds of data brokers is time-intensive but illuminating. Many consumers who go through the process are shocked by the volume and specificity of the information in their files — information they never knowingly provided to anyone.
We send legal CCPA deletion demands to 2,415 data brokers, request disclosures from 37 consumer reporting agencies, and target government surveillance brokers and car manufacturers. We see what they have on you — and we make them delete it. $9.95/month.
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