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

Post by smhost » Tue, Mar 07, 2017, 7:35 AM UTC

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.

Post by jey » Tue, Mar 07, 2017, 8:08 AM UTC

edwhitesell wrote: post #117

TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the USPS has a detailed process for formally putting a company on notice for mailing someone who has specifically unsubscribed, and that process ends in massive fines for continued mailing to that person. I read a report of someone doing that to stop receiving persistent Dell catalogs.) I would love to learn this process! I've repeatedly asked for a certain mailing to stop and it hasn't ceased.

I'd rather see much larger bulk rates via the USPS for something like "environmental impact". For example, I'm currently getting no less than 3 letters per week from Spectrum (formerly TWC) promoting their new triple-play plans. I drop all of them in the recycling bin. I couldn't care less about their bottom line, but I do care about the environmental impact. At 3x per week, it probably costs them around USD$0.80/wee…

Post by szc » Tue, Mar 07, 2017, 9:18 AM UTC

criddell wrote: post #26

Last year I was getting constant calls and snail mail about buying an extended car warranty on a car that I no longer own. I asked the place where I bought my car if they sell that information and they claimed not to. So where do these sleazy companies get that data? The DMV? This year, I'm getting two or three calls every week about a buying a home security system and monitoring. I don't understand why these calls a…

Post by revelation » Tue, Mar 07, 2017, 9:42 AM UTC

intended wrote: post #199

ams6110 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No we don't forget. Those systems were analog and could only be scaled to a certain extent, after which you ran into management overhead. So in the example given by the OP, dominoes would not be updating your name in the directory. That would be data that evaporated and never made it to record. To increase the contrast - whole new types of clustering and analysis are now possible, at the moment a new data point is re…

Post by EmielMols » Tue, Mar 07, 2017, 10:09 AM UTC

jameslk wrote: post #44

JoshTriplett wrote: post #14

If anyone reading this thread is interested: I would pay non-trivial amounts of money on a regular basis for a service that systematically worked to eliminate records like these (and the sources they draw from), as well as chasing down sources of junk mail and the lists they ultimately draw from. The value would depend on effectiveness, and on the degree to which the service clearly reported exactly what they did. Ca…

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…