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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?

#161
post #72

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.

Google asks you to take a photo when it thinks you are somewhere like a newly built mall, or anywhere where they don't have many photos in general.

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

#162
post #51

Earlier 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.

Depends where you are in the country. Many rural places don't have home delivery and only have P.O. Boxes. Home delivery from Amazon, etc. requires a bit of work.

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

#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 (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?

#164
post #55

If 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…

You can do this with gmail.

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?

#165

Earlier 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.

Game theory on your comment, sure... but I was just referring to "price per record/line item" -- how to separate these???

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

#166

Earlier 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!"

Maybe the solution is to sign up about 3000 people at every address you've ever lived at, if all of us sign up for hardcopy catalogues everywhere under every variant of our own names and fictitious names maybe they'll eventually stop or go out if business.

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

#167
post #139

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…

Thanks, this is very useful.

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?

#168

Earlier 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.

somehow misread this entire post

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

#169
post #44

Earlier 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 can't remember the exact reasons since it was something I was researching a couple years ago. I saw a few competing services that offered annual plans in the $50-$100 range and I think I divided that by 12 and then imagined what would happen when people got most of the value out of the service on first use. It seems to be a very niche market and I'm not sure how much of a pain point it really is to that niche.

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.

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

#170
The one that surprised me is to learn that virtually all health insurance companies sell your personal health information. Most people think this is illegal because the data is sensitive. But it turns out that if it's generated by a business transaction (i.e. a claim between your doctor and your insurance company) then it's not considered PHI and it's not protected.
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