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Figuring out how to remove personal information from internet sites and data brokers can be a real chore, It can be unnerving to enter your own name into a search engine and see results about you that may include your address, age, phone number and more. Where did they get it? What are they using it for? Can you make them remove it? Businesses and governments have been collecting information about people for centuries. William the Conqueror famously commissioned a record of property ownership in England back in 1085 called the Domesday Book. It wasn't a detailed census, but it did include the names of people who owned property and where that property was. Nowadays, many records are created digitally or digitized for easier access. This makes working with and sharing that information easier for everyone. Government data including vital records, tax information, voting details, salaries of government employees and more are required to be public by law. The laws differ by location on what must be made available, how much and when, but at least in the United States it's probable that some, if not all, of those details are legally available.
If William had had Zillow, there would have been no need for the Domesday Book. Before everyone had access to the internet, someone would have had to go to the appropriate records offices (or in some cases mail a request) to get that information. Now with a little know-how, time and energy, it's much easier to collect data that most people consider sensitive or even private. Many laws restrict how much information can be shared by an individual agency, but with a little from here and a little from there, someone can put together details and build a public profile about you. If you've searched for your own name and found information about yourself on the first page, chances are you're seeing results from sites called people finders. These sites take legally available information and build profiles that they make available online. Many of these sites offer the user access to email, phone number or other identifying information (sometimes even your Social Security number) and things like your date of birth, home address, previous residences, your home's valuation, the names of your relatives, your religion, your ethnicity, hobbies, places of employment, sites where you have accounts and a host of other personal details.
These data brokers will often display a good bit of information for free, and provide lots of other information, including legal and criminal records, for a fee. Can You Remove Your Data from a People-finder Site? Those are other potential sources of information beside people-finder sites. You may have shared your hobbies on social media or created a public wish list on a shopping site. Businesses of all kinds - even brick-and-mortar stores - sell mailing lists of their customers to others, too. Sometimes it's easy to figure out whom, especially when the original misspelled your name and that misspelling starts popping up on junk mail. If you've made a donation to one charity you might start receiving emails or letters from lots of other charities in the same space. Charities make additional money from selling their mailing lists to other charities. If you fill out a survey to enter a sweepstake, that could land you on another mailing list.
The person may seem to know details that only someone close to you could know, and that's how they get you to trust them. Catfishing is a concern, but on a day-to-day basis, it's much more likely that someone is learning as much as they can about you to sell you something. We're all becoming increasingly aware that websites track our online movements with cookies so that they can target us with advertising. The same thing happens with mobile apps for social networks. You probably gave them permission to do that when you accepted the terms and conditions of the service. You did read those terms before you clicked the Accept button, right? You're likely to see sites that offer to provide directory information about you, under the guise of white pages or people finders or background checkers or market research services, and then make your information available online. The simplest way to find out what's out there about you is to do searches for your name, email addresses and other identifying information.
You can start with a search engine such as Google, but you're likely to get an overwhelming amount of information unconnected to you - or about people who share your name or screenname. A search engine can be useful to see the top hits that your contact information yields, just to check on your online reputation. But searching the data collection sites will likely prove far more fruitful - and perhaps frightening. The internet is a very large network, and there are parts of it most of us don't use every day. Some information about you might be on what some refer to as the surface web, made up of web pages to which other sites link and that can therefore be found by search engines like Google. But unlike typical search engines, data brokers - organizations that collect information and license these databases to others - glean much of the data they collect from what some people call the deep web or the dark web.
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