Data brokers, also known as information brokers, collect personal information, package it into bundles, and sell it to advertisers or other third parties.

On the Internet, we are effectively giving away huge amounts of personal information by using search engines, posting on social media, accessing websites that track us, using mobile phone APPS, buying and selling etc.

We give this information away freely and sometimes it’s used for our benefit but often to help businesses sell more to us and scammers to take from us.

Data brokerage relies on this freely available information that they can collect, package and sell on.

How Do They Get Your Data?

1. Social media sites are a wealth of data to the brokers.
2. Many APPS and web sites track your activities on their systems then sell that data to brokers.
3. Tracking your activities on search engines and web sites. Often this is through tracking cookies which are used by the web sites you visit and that data can be aggregated.
4. Browser fingerprinting. This is a relatively recent means of identifying people by using all of the data from your browser as you browse a website. It includes your IP address, browser details, your time zone, your language settings, any advert blockers, screen resolution and more. The idea is that this gives not quite a unique fingerprint but does make it possible for tracking across multiple websites.
5. Ecommerce sites that track your activities. They do this to aid with how the web site works but also to help their Marketing activities. Some make the data available to data brokers.
6. Some brokers also use off line data from sources such as The Census, birth certificates, marriage licences etc.

You can contact data brokers and ask what data they have about you and ask for it to be deleted. But there are a lot of data brokers to contact and they will continue to collect data about you.

Steps To Reduce your Digital Footprint:

• Cancel any shop credit cards and loyalty programs you’re signed up with
• Set your social media accounts to private and delete any that you don’t need
• Make sure not to post any private information on social media and remove anything personal from your profiles
• Use anti-tracking services to cut down the information that web sites you visit can learn about you
• Use a secure browser that allows for anonymous browsing, without handing over details on every web site you visit to the search engines
• Consider using a Virtual Private Network

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.