I Found My Personal Data on 47 Broker Sites. Then Things Got Worse
Last fall I got a call. Not a robocall — an actual person, who used my middle name, mentioned the street I grew up on, and tried to get me to "verify" my bank's last four digits. I hung up before they finished the second sentence. Then I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out where the middle-name-plus-childhood-street combo could have come from. That's how I ended up doing what I'd been putting off for years: actually auditing what's out there about me.
Forty-seven data broker sites had my phone number. I'm going to walk you through how I found them, what I did about it, and the parts of this process that nobody really warns you about.
The starting point
I'd assumed the broker list was small. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified — the obvious ones. The reality is that there's a long tail of sites you've never heard of running...
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