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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?

#81

Post by TrinaryWorksToo »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #73
jameslk wrote: 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…

It's possible that the business could be so successful that everyone uses it, the services selling this information all run out of customers and go out of business, none of them come up with newer and more evil ways to do this, and you run out of potential customers. In which case: mission accomplished , retire on your giant pile of money and bask in the knowledge that you made a far better place. (Avoid scenarios in…

>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.

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

#83

Post by blackbagboys »

mehrdadn wrote: post #52
twblalock wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When e.g. a court needs to control someone's information surely they know who these people are and they can let them know? Is there a secret list in every courthouse or something? The courts don't control information in that way.

That's surprising. So what happens when there is a high profile case and the court fears for the jurors' lives? Or the case itself involves someone whose life will be in danger afterwards? If anybody can find out where these people live then they're toast. The courts have to suppress the information legally somehow, right? If not the old information, at least they need some protection against mining of new informatio…

> Are you literally saying they have no way to order all the first-level companies to stop sharing data on someone?

This is exactly what he's saying. There is no central node of control for this kind of information. You are operating from entirely unjustified assumptions.

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

#84

Post by mehrdadn »

cosmie wrote: post #78
mehrdadn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this though: >> Or when someone wants to start another one of the higher-level companies -- how do they know which core aggregators to buy from? If that's a secret then how would they find out?

> If that's a secret then how would they find out? You don't. I've worked in data acquisition in the past, both buying data and selling it. Sometimes as the original source of truth and sometimes as a middleman that does data cleaning, standardization, appending (from other sources), then selling the derived product downstream. Companies in that space guard their upstream sources quite heavily, because they don't wan…

+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 suppliers and clients, but surely it doesn't prevent you from listing some other companies in this space that you know of (including but not limited to your competitors)? I don't understand why you shouldn't be able to name any company just because you've worked at one of them.

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

#85

Post by fragmede »

dsp1234 wrote: post #42
mehrdadn wrote: post #24

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. How can there not be a public list of these data miners? When e.g. a court needs to control someone's information surely they know who these people are and they can let them know? Is there a secret list in every courthouse or something? Or when someone wants to star…

a court needs to control someone's information surely they know who these people are and they can let them know? I think you have a misunderstanding of what a US court can do. A court can only tell a specific party to take some action, and generally only if that party is somehow related to the legal action (such as being a defendant). Generally, there is no judgement that a court can make that can effect unnamed part…

> Theoretically, you could sue each company with your data, and a court could tell each of those companies to remove your information. But it would have to be for each one, and the judgement is only binding on those companies.

As an individual, that sounds like a lot of work for little gain, but if there were pre-filled out forms, and all I had to do was put in my name, I'd be willing to file lawsuits to get my name removed.

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

#87

Post by trelliscoded »

mehrdadn wrote: post #63
trelliscoded wrote: post #53

I saw a great talk by a private investigator at a security conference on this topic, and did some research after the talk to confirm what he was saying. The short version is what you're asking for is going to be an uphill battle. Data aggregation companies don't want to disclose their sources because their services are often used by debt collectors and other organizations who want to find people who don't want to be…

Thank you for the legal information! That was enlightening. The one question I have remaining though is: when these companies pop up, how do they know whom to buy your information from if there's no list and nobody tells them?

It's all very incestuous. I suspect that part of what happens is that new companies are comprised of people who have previously worked in the industry, so they have general knowledge of who the available providers are. Without prior experience in the industry, I suspect you're not going to be in business very long.

The other part of getting initial sources is probably calling companies in retail, insurance, etc and pitching them on how much they would make selling customer data to them. If I had to do it, I'd probably get industry reports, sort by annual revenue, start at the top and work my way down as I try to get a hold of the consumer data department at each company.

I've also been approached by these guys when I was part of shutting a company down. They wanted to buy our customer database. I guess when one of these companies shuts down, some new one can buy the database and use that as a seed for new operations.

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

#88

Post by mehrdadn »

dsp1234 wrote: post #68
mehrdadn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right, but where do they get their data? Yeah, I'm basically looking for the companies whose answer to this question is " by actually mining the data ourselves from your doctor, grocery store, Facebook, etc.".

Why do you think it works this way and not the other way around as well? Grocery stores shop their data around to see who will pay the most for it. A person who is out of work goes to the local courthouse and requests a bunch of records, compiles them into a spreadsheet and then cold (or warm with something like LinkedIn) calls to see if anyone is interested in the data. An online quiz company is going out of busines…

Good question. I thought it works that way because it takes a lot of work to sanitize and cross-link people's data to other datasets accurately, so even if it's a "push" model, I still can't believe that every single website that does this does their own data cleaning & ML & whatnot. It's far too much repeated work and a good business to just do the work and sell it off to others. So I'd assume a few companies have to be making profits at the lower layer regardless of whether it's a pull or a push model.

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

#89

Post by trelliscoded »

dublinben wrote: post #71
trelliscoded wrote: post #53

I saw a great talk by a private investigator at a security conference on this topic, and did some research after the talk to confirm what he was saying. The short version is what you're asking for is going to be an uphill battle. Data aggregation companies don't want to disclose their sources because their services are often used by debt collectors and other organizations who want to find people who don't want to be…

Do you happen to have a link to that talk, or the name of the presenter?

I forget, and the conference site took the slides down. It was more than 10 years ago.

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

#90

Post by JoshTriplett »

TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #81
JoshTriplett wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that the business could be so successful that everyone uses it, the services selling this information all run out of customers and go out of business, none of them come up with newer and more evil ways to do this, and you run out of potential customers. In which case: mission accomplished , retire on your giant pile of money and bask in the knowledge that you made a far better place. (Avoid scenarios in…

>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.

http://changelog.complete.org/archives/741-from-dell-a-uniqu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20090201192037/http://junkbuster...

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