Have you ever gone to the doctor, signed up for a gym, or signed up for your local grocery store's membership rewards program? That's how they get your information.
I went to Pavilions grocery store the other day, and when I got home, the Facebook app said, "Have you been to Pavilions recently? Click here." I want Facebook to find friends and events nearby me, not track where I go. I can only imagine all the location data Google, Apple and Facebook is collecting and what they're actually doing with it.
Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
161–170 of 256 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no such public list. Most of these companies are privately held, their methods are trade secrets, and there is no real form of legal recourse. Your best bet would be to buy a book like this: https://www.amazon.com/Hiding-Internet-Eliminating-Personal-... and follow the recommendations, but even that is only likely to be half-effective. Much of the public information is mined from sources like credit headers,…
I have a friend who is super paranoid about privacy stuff. He was even able to get his utility bills to use a PO box rather than his home address, which he said was extremely difficult.
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#163I 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 (I was poor) up to that point -- yet the rep was easily able to list all the places I had resided from college to present, along with a host of off-the-books housemates.
"Where the fsck did you get all this?!" I demanded.
"Have you ever ordered a pizza?"
Turns out, some fast food chains do a brisk business in reselling customer data. I had ordered from Domino's once, but that was enough to link my name to a specific location.
This experience has made me extremely sensitive about the information I give while making a purchase. When I lived in the US, I stopped having food delivered, paid in cash, and never signed up for branded credit cards. I rented informally and, whenever possible, tried to just pay the landlord my share of utilities in cash. Anything to keep a lower profile.
Far more companies than you realize are collecting as much data as possible about you, your habits, and your relations. So I'm afraid your search for a canonical list of data sources is ultimately fruitless. In this new economy, you are always the product.
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#164If you have your own domain name with a wildcard, it's really helpful to enter: someservice@mydomain.com as your email. That way if it leaks you'll know who did it and can setup much more robust rules to block. I'll use the domain name as the main address so I remember which name goes to which site. For physical address mailings, you can hyphenate (or use a middle name) as the service. So First Service-Last as the ad…
For example if your gmail is root@gmail.com
You can do root+yahoo@gmail.com, root+reddit@gmail.com and such on.
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about letting a user enter all their pertinent details, then having a "NUKE ME" button and it would eval how many sites and places to nuke from, and you base your costs to the user based on the effort to nuke the info you find. Then give a very straightforward list to the user and let them select which site/item they want to nuke and provide an upfront cost to them. * You're found on sites 1, 2, 3 * Nuking site…
Offering a reward that rises in proportion to the number of sites with your personal information might just provide an incentive to create more such sites. The more you'd pay for privacy, the more it would be worth to violate it.
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dell is pretty bad. I get every month three (when one is more than enough) catalogs to my address, because of slight variances in my name, even though they are all the same person.
We get four catalogs a month to three different people, one of which gets two catalogs; one addressed to their role as Vice President, and one as Boardmember. We don't even want _one_ of them. It's not like we're going to see a new printer in a catalog and say "hey, sounds like a great buy!"
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#167You 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 paranoid voice in my head is wondering if these forms don't actually opt me out of anything, and instead just confirm to these companies that the information they have on me is correct.
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been recently: 1) Segregating automated email to some @customdomain.com address (Yandex and Zoho host vanity domains for free) 2) Forward all email @ that domain to a common inbox 3) Sign-up with servicename@customdomain.com (e.g: facebook@customdomain.com) You no-longer need to unsubscribe using dubious e-mail links, just automatically black-hole emails that come from spammer@customdomain.com So, far, so good.…
Useful for email, but this is primarily about postal spam.
Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've considered working on this problem from a business standpoint, but I couldn't figure out a good business model for it. I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services. My guess is that they would sign up for a month and after their information has been removed, immediately cancel their subscription until they needed to do it again. And a yearly fee seeme…
>"I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services." I would be interested in hearing what are you basing this on? Did you do some market research? My feeling is that there is money in privacy, people seem to have no problem paying 5 or 10 dollars a month for a VPN provider for instance.
I had some other ideas to differentiate, which were a bit of a gray-area hack. This included pulling from the same data sources that Spokeo and similar services use to be able to search for that data. That way, the user wouldn't have to enter any personal information other than say an email address.
You could then offer a free service that let users enter their email address and they would find all the sites you've crawled where you found their information (similar to haveibeenpwned.com), with an upsell to automatically remove it.
Once a subscriber was signed up or previously had used the free service and hadn't opted out, I would keep crawling services for additional data and then give them a warning email when their data popped up again.
It seemed like a semi-reasonable business model at the time, but just a really small market, and I had other business ideas I wanted to pursue.