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Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

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Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#241

Post by cema »

stevedekorte wrote: post #183
monodeldiablo wrote: post #163

I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?") that are incredibly creepy. I was shocked that they had so much data on me -- I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements…

Good to know. Let's all start ordering pizza's, etc under random other names. Create a haystack to hide the needle.

This would not work, the data is heavily cross-referenced. You would simply have more names (as possible neighbors, or rather co-habitators) in your account.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#242

Post by justin66 »

cosmie wrote: post #110
mehrdadn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 thanks for the explanation! And regarding this: > Edited to add: You're also asking a lot of people in here to name specific companies even if they can't give you huge lists. This space is super heavy on NDAs (and trigger happy on enforcing them). If you've actually worked in it, there's simply no way you're able to name drop legally. I understand that an NDA would prevent you from naming your own company or your…

Every company I know in the space is a company that we've had at least preliminary conversations with (seeing if there's any potential relationship to either purchase from or sell to that company). Just having that conversation required getting a mutual NDA in place, since the conversation involves revealing your capabilities (even if not your sources). And that's assuming you're even aware of all the NDAs your compa…

> Just having that conversation required getting a mutual NDA in place, since the conversation involves revealing your capabilities (even if not your sources). And that's assuming you're even aware of all the NDAs your company has signed with other companies, which isn't always the case.

Interesting. Eight years ago I worked as a buyer for the aggregator with the largest criminal database and I don't remember having to sign an NDA during those sorts of talks. It's possible I've forgotten, but I think it was more a matter of people wanting to know our coverage as much as we wanted to know theirs.

As an aside, the value of those talks wasn't usually in acquiring the data, except maybe in the short term. We always preferred to go directly to the source. The value was simply in learning that the data from a specific source was even available. In a few instances, that got pretty frustrating, since I knew that the seller of the data was scraping a given court's website against that court's wishes (and the TOS on the website), with all associated problems with accuracy and ethics that entails.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#243

Post by whatdiditsay88 »

asperous wrote: post #189
monodeldiablo wrote: post #163

I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?") that are incredibly creepy. I was shocked that they had so much data on me -- I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements…

Their privacy policy says they don't do this: https://www.dominos.com/en/#/content/privacy/

> in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago.

What did their privacy policy say "nearly a decade ago".

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#244

Post by whatdiditsay88 »

ams6110 wrote: post #186
monodeldiablo wrote: post #163

I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?") that are incredibly creepy. I was shocked that they had so much data on me -- I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements…

Do we forget that not long ago everyone's name, address, and phone number was published in the phone book (unless you paid extra for an unlisted number), and hospital admissions were published in the daily newspaper. It used to be unremarkable, and now people shriek "privacy!!" when it's discovered that some mundane detail about their life is not a closely held secret.

You're conflating public services with private capitalism. Not surprisingly, there is nuance beyond just the surface level view.

Not long ago, before Twitter, Facebook, and even ubiquitous phone access for rural areas, they did those things to keep the locals in the know.

Quite a big difference between that and private equity firms buying all these retail outlets, and slurping up everyone's details to peddle more products for private gain.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#245

Post by tracker1 »

You don't think all those fake facebook/twitter profiles trying to follow/friend you are just for the lulz do you... They're mostly for mining your personal information. This extends to transaction processing agreements with advertisers and merchants for the purpose of analytics and tracking, as well as information sharing from credit card companies themselves, and peering agreements for data.

Just your email address alone, let alone combined with IP information can result in being able to find a lot of information about you... then you take that and correlate it to public information, cc purchase history, online profiles, it's a treasure trove. That doesn't even count extra data gleaned from all the tracking cookies.

All said, I'm still far more concerned about government use of similar data than I am private businesses.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#246

Post by tracker1 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #11
pandabear187 wrote: post #3

I have insider knowledge as I used to work for one of these companies. Depending on the product you purchase the data comes from multiple sources. Also these companies have sophisticated machine learning capabilities to build a profile based on various attributes found in seemingly unrelated pieces of data. So the list consists of credit reporting agencies, public records, your online profiles with public access, cou…

Thank you for the reply. Can you actually give some kind of a list though? The entire problem here is everyone explains the how but no one is willing to explain the who . I certainly understand it's "multiple sources", I'm asking who are these sources I keep hearing about. There can't be nearly as many sources as there are sites who buy from them. If you'd like to not name the company you worked for yourself then cou…

If you ever buy anything with a CC, use a "membership" card anywhere, or have anything delivered, or for that matter purchased online, then there's a greater chance than not this data was shared by the merchant, transaction provider and/or the credit card company themselves.

If you have an online profile, with any friends that aren't paranoid, and allow your friends to see any private information, then this can be collected/correlated by the various bot farms.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#247

Post by _archon_ »

bks wrote: post #139
executive wrote: post #28

You mean data brokers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_broker ) Top US brokers: - Acxiom - Experian - Epsilon - CoreLogic - Datalogix - eBureau - ID Analytics - inome - PeekYou - Rapleaf - Recorded Future Protip: loyalty/reward cards are a gold mine, especially drug store purchase receipt data

Opt out links I found - Acxiom - https://isapps.acxiom.com/optout/optout.aspx Experian - http://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/... DataLogix Holdings, Inc. https://www.datalogix.com/privacy/#opt-out-landing Epsilon Data Management, LLC http://www.epsilon.com/consumer-preference-center Equifax, Inc - https://help.equifax.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2/noInterce... Fair Isaac Corporation http://www…

The LexisNexis link 404s (added a space), I believe this is correct:

https://www.lexisnexis.com/privacy/for-consumers/opt-out-of-...

Also, the following can't hurt:

https://www.lexisnexis.com/privacy/directmarketingopt-out.as...

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#248

Post by monodeldiablo »

asperous wrote: post #189
monodeldiablo wrote: post #163

I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?") that are incredibly creepy. I was shocked that they had so much data on me -- I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements…

Their privacy policy says they don't do this: https://www.dominos.com/en/#/content/privacy/

Perhaps the policy is new. This was about a decade ago.

Regardless, that data is out there now, and no change in privacy policy is going to put that cat back into the bag. Besides, someone else is surely acting as a new source for current data.

It wasn't just my location information, though. They were able to ask detailed questions about my personal social network, before Facebook was ubiquitous and LinkedIn was a thing. They were clearly joining several disparate datasets together to discovery relationships.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#249

Post by monodeldiablo »

ams6110 wrote: post #186
monodeldiablo wrote: post #163

I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?") that are incredibly creepy. I was shocked that they had so much data on me -- I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements…

Do we forget that not long ago everyone's name, address, and phone number was published in the phone book (unless you paid extra for an unlisted number), and hospital admissions were published in the daily newspaper. It used to be unremarkable, and now people shriek "privacy!!" when it's discovered that some mundane detail about their life is not a closely held secret.

"Do we forget that not long ago everyone's name, address, and phone number was published in the phone book [...]"

The phone book is an opt-in system, with the ability to remain "unlisted". There's absolutely no such choice, though, from these modern, private data collectors. And they're everywhere.

Consider the following hypothetical: A battered wife flees her husband and takes shelter in a shared house run by a women's organization.

In your phone book world, she didn't need to dramatically alter her existence to stay safe. She could continue to maintain a reasonable subset of her professional and social relationships. She could get a new job in a new city. She could buy groceries. She could pay her own electricity bill. And she definitely didn't need to take her life in her hands to order a cheese pizza.

In this brave new world, though, her ex can track her with the utmost ease. She has to shed nearly every piece of her modern identity -- reconfigure apps, wipe her phone/laptop/tablet, stop using sites that geolocate via IP, and halt nearly all interactions with the modern economy -- at significant social cost.

The sheer number and diversity of data collection points -- and their increasing necessity to participate in the digital economy -- makes opting out orders-of-magnitude more difficult. Yours is a false comparison.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#250

Post by Sephr »

Sephr wrote: post #203
megous wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use random 20 char string for the local part. That way there's no question about the leak. Spammers use a lot of dictionary words in the local part of the email address, so it's better to have a random string. If you're using password manager anyway, there's no reason not to make email/username random too. For smaller e-shops you might find some with actively exploited 0days this way. I did.

That is useful, but how do you manage to remember the mappings? I want to know what random string corresponds to what service without having to search my password manager. The best of both worlds would be random local part + a Chrome extension that manages the mappings. The Chrome extension can then replace the local part in Google Inbox with the corresponding site name.

Update: Just use service name + random string concatenated for the local part. Seems like the best solution.
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