THIS IS NOT THE NSA [NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY] , BUT CORPORATIONS THAT COLLECT MORE DATA THAN THE NSA EVER HAS ON EVERY AMERICAN "CONSUMER".
"DATA BROKERS" ARE EVEN SELLING LISTS OF RAPE VICTIMS, THOSE WHO SUFFER FROM AIDS/HIV, LISTS OF CANCER PATIENTS, PATIENTS WITH DEMENTIA, NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF POLICE OFFICERS, TEACHERS, ETC, ALL SO CORPORATE AMERICA AND UNETHICAL COMPANIES CAN MARKET REAL OR IMAGINED PRODUCTS AND SERVICES TO "CONSUMERS".
SINCE DATA BROKERS REALLY DON'T KNOW THE ONES BUYING SUCH INFORMATION, ANYONE CAN POSE AS A VALID "ORGANIZATION" AND BUY THIS DATA!
<<Currently, data brokers are required by federal law to maintain the privacy of a consumer's data ONLY IF it is used for credit, employment, insurance or housing. BUT while medical privacy laws prohibit doctors from sharing patient information, medical information that data brokers get elsewhere, such as from the purchase of over-the-counter drugs and other health care items, is fair game.
In some cases, such lists could put people in harm's way.
The list of more than 30,000 police officers' home addresses, for example, could put the lives of the officers and their families in danger, said Dixon. Meanwhile, a list of seniors suffering from dementia could open them up to predatory financial offers.>>
YOUR DATE OF BIRTH, YOUR HOME ADDRESS, YOUR TELEPHONE NUMBER, YOUR MARITAL STATUS, WHERE YOU WORK, HOW MUCH INCOME YOU MAKE, YOUR POLITICAL PARTY AFFILIATION, THE NAMES AND AGES OF ANY CHILDREN YOU HAVE, WHERE THEY ATTEND SCHOOL, THE SAME INFORMATION ABOUT ALL YOUR "CONTACTS", WHETHER FRIENDS OR FAMILY, EVEN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE TEST SCORES, HEALTH INFORMATION, STATUS OF YOUR MORTGAGE OR OTHER LOANS, ALL ARE SOLD OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO ANYONE WITH THE MONEY TO BUY IT!
"DATA BROKERS" ALL ACROSS THE GLOBE TRACK AND SELL YOUR FINANCIAL INFORMATION TO "PAYDAY LENDERS", DEBT CONSOLIDATION FIRMS, AND OTHER MARKETS.
SOME OF WHAT THEY TRACK AND SELL IS NOT QUITE LEGAL FOR THEM TO DO, BUT LOOPHOLES ALLOW MORE THAN YOU MAY THINK TO BE COLLECTED AND SOLD.
SUCH DATA MINING AND DATA SELLING OFTEN TARGETS THE POOR, THE ELDERLY, THOSE IN FINANCIAL DIFFICULTY, OR YOUNG, INEXPERIENCED STUDENTS AND THE UNEMPLOYED STRUGGLING TO MAKE ENDS MEET.
SCAMMERS AND UNETHICAL LENDING COMPANIES, THOSE OFFERING "PAYDAY LOANS", WAYS TO "MAKE A QUICK BUCK", "HELP" FOR SINGLE PARENTS, THE RECENTLY WIDOWED, ETC, MOVE IN QUICKLY WITH ALL THIS DATA THEY BUY AND MAKE BAD TIMES EVEN WORSE FOR MANY OF AMERICA'S MOST VULNERABLE CITIZENS.
THOSE WHO USE SCAMS TO TARGET THE UNSUSPECTING OFTEN USE THIS DATA FOR TELEMARKETING TO CONSUMERS, OFFERING GOODS OR SERVICES THAT DON'T EXIST, JUST TO GET THEIR TARGETS TO GIVE THEM THEIR BANKING INFORMATION.
SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST NOT AWARE OF THE OLD ADAGE, "IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT PROBABLY IS NOT TRUE!"
BUT THIS IS NOT HAPPENING JUST IN AMERICA!
IN MANY OF THE POORER NATIONS, THE POOREST ARE TARGETS FOR EVEN WORSE THINGS, LIKE SELLING AN ORGAN, OR A CHILD FOR MUCH-NEEDED MONEY!
April 29, 2014, CNN NEWS:
<<Senator John "Jay" Rockefeller of West Virginia, called out one data broker, List Connection, in a February letter to NextMark, a website that advertises a variety of data broker lists.
Rockefeller, who heads the Senate Commerce Committee, is sponsoring legislation that would allow consumers to see and correct the information collected about them and to opt out of the lists entirely.
Wednesday's hearing came after a year-long Senate committee investigation into the $156 billion data brokerage industry.
The Federal Trade Commission has also called on major data brokers to increase transparency into their data practices.
Committee chairman John "Jay" Rockefeller criticized several of the country's largest data brokers for resisting the oversight and said he would continue to push for information on how they get data and who they sell it to.
In his closing remarks, the senator said he was "revolted" by the lists Dixon had revealed and said the commission would continue to explore the issue.
"I think it's our job as government to... bring into sunlight what is going on," he said. "I think its serious, and I think it's a dark underside of American life, in which people make a lot of money and cause people to suffer even more."
Another list Rockefeller cited featured leads for sweepstakes offers.
The data broker, Multimedia Lists, markets it as a list featuring "highly responsive opportunity seekers" who are ripe for promotional offers, sweepstakes, contests and other "opportunities to make easy money."
Multimedia Lists did not respond to phone and email requests for comment.
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, marketers aren't allowed to use your sensitive credit information, like your credit score, unless it's to make a "firm" offer of credit, say for a credit card or auto loan.
But there is a lot of other information -- like whether or not you're facing foreclosure or get denied for a credit card -- that data brokers argue is fair game.
While data broker's lists are often used for harmless purposes, like sending catalogs, the growing use of all of this personal information is raising red flags among privacy advocates.
"We shouldn't use our most private information for just any marketing purpose," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
"We need additional protections."
PIRG is calling for increased transparency regarding who is buying our information and how it is being used.>>
THE VIDEO AT THE FOLLOWING WEBSITE SHOWS HOW EVEN YOUR CHILD'S TEST SCORES CAN BE FOUND ONLINE!
http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2013/06/27/t-cmr-education-data-kids-cloud.cnnmoney/
Ever wonder how it seems that your personal email page knows what you just wrote, what you just viewed and posts advertisements related to that beside your inbox emails?
THERE ARE PROGRAMS THAT TRACK YOUR ONLINE WEB SEARCHES, THE WEBSITES YOU VISIT, EVEN THE SUBJECT LINES OF THE EMAILS WE SEND OR RECEIVE, THAT'S HOW!
BUT THAT'S JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG!
THIS INFORMATION IS TRANSMITTED INSTANTLY TO ANY POINT ON THE GLOBAL MAP TO THOSE WHO WANT SUCH DATA TO MARKET PRODUCTS OR SERVICES TO YOU.
WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO IS UP FOR SALE!
THERE ARE PERHAPS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHO DO NOTHING ELSE ALL DAY BUT TRACK EVERYTHING YOU DO ONLINE, EVERY ITEM YOU BUY USING A CREDIT OR DEBIT CARD OR CHECK, ALL YOUR "SOCIAL MEDIA" POSTS AND DATA FROM THOSE.
<<Facebook and Twitter are particularly egregious.
By scanning posts for a particular individual, you can find out who they are associating with, EVEN what users look like, etc. It's TRULY dangerous>>
<<People who warned us long ago that such data-mining and data-selling would be used by corporate America AND the governments of the world were decried as paranoid tinfoil hat-wearing lunatics again and again.
Looks like they were RIGHT!>>
SOMEONE REMARKED THAT NO ONE READS THE LEGALESE OF SOCIAL MEDIA'S "TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENTS" , SO FEW ARE AWARE WHAT ALL THEY GIVE UP BY OPENING A FACEBOOK OR TWITTER ACCOUNT.
IGNORANCE IS NO EXCUSE!
<<Not reading something is no excuse for blindly accepting it.
Not understanding it because of the way it's written is different.
Terms of service are written by lawyers for lawyers, and you're not supposed to understand them. Besides, if the ToS simply said, "You agree to let us do whatever the hell we want with your information", most people would accept anyway.>>
TRUE, MOST WOULD GO RIGHT AHEAD!
<<Your data was never "yours". Even before computers, you were being tracked.
Your name and number were in the phone book, the police have your license plate number, know where you live and, through toll roads, knew where you went.
Stores would sell client lists WAY before people started screaming about it.
Magazine and newspaper subscription data was all for sale.
Same for catalog shopping (REMEMBER Sears?).
Even Census data was available.
No, you left a trail.
Now with the speed and connectivity of computers and the internet It is even more prolific, but in essence the same.
You want to "Drop Out?"
Try it.
Can't happen if you want to live a "normal" life.>>
DEFINE NORMAL???
September 5, 2013, CNN NEWS
<<[Such PRIVATE info] comes from [companies like] Acxiom, one of the country's largest data brokers, which on Wednesday unveiled a website called AboutTheData.com.
Punch in your name and a few key stats, and you can see a snapshot of the information sold to retailers and marketers so they can target you with things like catalogs and coupons.
Acxiom claims to have a massive database that holds information on 190 million consumers -- everything from education level and political leanings to ethnicity and income level.
The CEO, Scott Howe, says, “Our digital reach will soon approach nearly every Internet user in the US.”2
"I knew they had a lot of information about me, but I didn't know they knew this much," said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.
Dixon, meanwhile, noticed that her characteristics changed drastically based on which email address she used to look up her profile.
"One of these identities is not getting the same offers as the other identity," she said. "The concern is that the opportunities that you are being offered in life change based on how you are characterized."
In an informal survey of 10 people at CNNMoney, including myself, everyone reported at least one major inaccuracy in their profile. Most people reported multiple errors, and several people said many of the major personal, economic and other characteristics listed for them were wrong. A few people said their profiles were mostly on target.
Household income and the highest level of education were off for most. Several people were incorrectly listed as parents like I was, while others had the wrong ethnicity based on their "surname."
Acxiom said up to 30% of a person's profile information may be wrong at any given time since it is based on information from a variety of sources, including public records and surveys that may be incorrect or out of date.
Privacy advocates say the inaccuracies are troublesome since there is still little transparency about which companies purchase the information and how exactly they use it.
"It's gotten to the point where the big data machine is churning out profiles of consumers, which not only may or may not be accurate, but might be used for purposes that the individuals never imagined or consented to," said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America, a watchdog group.>>
April 2, 2014
Data brokers, analytics firms and retailers are creating hundreds of "secret" consumer scores that rank you on everything from the likelihood you will keep your job to how likely you are to commit fraud, according to a report released Wednesday by nonprofit World Privacy Forum.
Marketers, financial institutions, wireless phone service providers, law enforcement agencies and others use these scores to do everything from promoting new products to investigating crimes.
Yet, while these consumer scores are pervasive, most consumers don't know they exist. Rarely are they able to view their scores, find out how they are compiled or used or correct inaccuracies like they can on a credit report, the World Privacy Forum found.
"Consumers have little to no ability to learn when their lives are affected in a major or minor way by a consumer score that they never heard about," the report's authors Pam Dixon and Bob Gellman wrote.
The two are calling for more transparency and government scrutiny of consumer scores.>>
<<Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them.
“But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World.
“We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”>>
CBS NEWS: "The Data Brokers", which aired on March 9, 2014
<<Over the past six months or so, a huge amount of attention has been paid to government snooping, and the bulk collection and storage of vast amounts of raw data in the name of national security.
What most of you don't know, or are just beginning to realize, is that a much greater and more immediate threat to your privacy is coming from thousands of companies you've probably never heard of, in the name of commerce.
They're called data brokers, and they are collecting, analyzing and packaging some of our most sensitive personal information and selling it as a commodity...to each other, to advertisers, even the government, often without our direct knowledge.
Much of this is the kind of harmless consumer marketing that's been going on for decades. What's changed is the volume and nature of the data being mined from the Internet and our mobile devices, and the growth of a multibillion dollar industry that operates in the shadows with virtually no oversight.>>
HOW A TARGET STORE KNEW A TEENAGER WAS PREGNANT BEFORE HER PARENTS KNEW!
[DATA MINING!]
FORBES MAGAZINE, 02/16/2012
<<Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be.
An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
(Nice customer service, Target.)
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Target was none too happy about Duhigg’s plans to write this story. They refused to let him go to Target headquarters. When he flew out anyway, he discovered he was on a list of prohibited visitors.>>
Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy.
Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
<<Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”
Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past.
As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail.
As Pole’s computers crawled
through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when
analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy
prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date
to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very
specific stages of her pregnancy.
Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit.
Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own.
(In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.)
All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in. >>
<<The recent revelations regarding the NSA’s collection of the personal information and the digital activities of millions of people across the world have attracted immense attention and public concern.
But there are equally troubling and equally opaque systems run by advertising, marketing, and data-mining firms that are far less known.
Using techniques ranging from supermarket loyalty cards to targeted advertising on Facebook, private companies systematically collect very personal information, from who you are, to what you do, to what you buy.
Data about your online and offline behavior are combined, analyzed, and sold to marketers, corporations, governments, and even criminals.
The scope of this collection, aggregation, and brokering of information is similar to, if not larger than, that of the NSA, yet it is almost entirely unregulated and many of the activities of data-mining and digital marketing firms are not publicly known at all.
The industry of collecting, aggregating, and brokering personal data is known as “database marketing.”
The second-largest company in this field, Acxiom, has 23,000 computer servers that process more than 50 trillion data transactions per year, according to The New York Times.1 It claims to have records on hundreds of millions of Americans, including 1.1 billion browser cookies (small pieces of data sent from a website, used to track the user’s activity), 200 million mobile profiles, and an average of 1,500 pieces of data per consumer. These data include information gleaned from publicly available records like home valuation and vehicle ownership, information about online behavior tracked through cookies, browser advertising, and the like, data from customer surveys, and “offline” buying behavior. >>
We asked the most privacy-aware people we could find what it would take to go off the radar. Hint: You're going to need to do more than throw away your laptop.
In a recent Pew Internet study, 37% of respondents said they thought it was possible to be completely anonymous online. From experts like Nico Sell, the cofounder of a secure communication app called Wickr,, you'll get a different range of answers about whether it's possible to live without any data trail:
"100% no," she says.
Many of her friends once considered her habits to be of the tin-foil-hat-wearing variety. But with this summer's revelations of the NSA's broad surveillance program, they’re starting to look a little more logical. “For the last couple of months,” Sell says, “My friends that are not in the security industry come up to me, and I hear this all the time, ‘You were right.’ ”
The people who have actually attempted to live without being tracked--most often due to a safety threat--will tell you that security cameras are just about everywhere, RFID tags seem to be in everything, and almost any movement results in becoming part of a database. “It’s basically impossible for you and I to decide, as of tomorrow, I’m going to remain off the radar and to survive for a month or 12 months,” says Gunter Ollmann, the CTO of security firm IOActive, who in his former work with law enforcement had several coworkers who dedicated themselves to remaining anonymous for the safety of their families. "The amount of prep work you have to do in order to stay off the radar involves years of investment leading up to that."
YOU MAY NOT BELIEVE THE FOLLOWING, BUT IT IS WELL-DOCUMENTED BY MAINSTREAM MEDIA...GO LOOK IT UP FOR YOURSELF!
<<A few years ago, a man who goes by the Internet handle “Puking Monkey” noticed devices reading his toll pass in places where there weren’t any tolls. He assumed that they were being used to track drivers’ movements. “People would say, 'Well you don’t know that, because it doesn’t tell you when it tracks you,'” he tells Fast Company. “I said, 'Okay, I’ll go prove it.' ”
He rigged his pass to make a mooing cow noise every time a device read his toll payment tag. And sure enough, it went off in front of Macy’s, near Time Square, and in several other places where there was no tollbooth in sight.
It turns out the city tracks toll passes in order to obtain real-time traffic information, a benign enough intention.
But what worries people like Puking Monkey about being tracked is rarely a database’s intended purpose.
It's that someone with access to the database will misuse it, like when NSA employees have spied on love interests,
A U.K. immigration officer once put his wife on a list of terrorist suspects in order to prevent her from flying into the country.
Or that it will be used for a purpose other than one it was built for, like when social security numbers were issued for retirement savings and then expanded to become universal identifiers.
Or, most likely, that it will be stolen, like the many times a hacker group called Anonymous gains access to someone's personal data and posts it online for public viewing.
By one security company's count, in 2012 there were 2,644 reported data breeches involving 267 million records.
In order to stop his toll pass from being tracked, Puking Monkey keeps it sealed in the foil bag it came in when he's not driving through a toll.
That only stops that data trail (minus toll points).
Automatic license plate readers, often mounted to a police car or street sign, are also logging data about where cars appear.
They typically take photos of every license plate that passes them and often these photos remain stored in a database for years.
Sometimes they are linked with other databases to help solve crimes.
Puking Monkey avoids license-plate readers by keeping his old, non-reflective license plate, which is more difficult to read than newer, reflective models.
Others who share his concerns salt their license plates, add bumper guards or otherwise obscure the writing--say by driving with the hatch down or driving with a trailer hatch attached—in order to avoid being tracked.
But that still doesn’t account for the tracking devices attached to the car itself.
To identify tires, which can come in handy if they’re recalled, tire manufacturers insert an RFID tag with a unique code that can be read from about 20 feet away by an RFID reader. "I have no way to know if it’s actually being tracked, but there are unique numbers in those tires that could be used that way," Puking Monkey says.
He uses a camera flash to zap his tires with enough energy to destroy the chips.
Tom Ritter, a principal security consultant at iSEC Partners, has come up with a creative way to subvert loyalty tracking without giving up discounts. When he sees someone has a card on their key chain, he asks if he can take a photo of the bar code to use with his own purchases.
They get extra points, and he gets discounts without giving up any of his privacy.
What you buy can paint a pretty good picture of what you’re doing, and many people aren’t willing to leave that information in a credit card company's database either.
Adam Havey, an artist who makes anti-surveillance gear, puts all of his purchases on a credit card registered under a fake name.
Then he uses the credit card in his actual name to pay the bill
(Update: Harvey clarified that this is a technique he heard about from Julia Angwin, who is writing a book about surveillance).
Ollmann buys prepaid gift cards with no attribution back to him to do his online shopping.
The most intense privacy seekers have a strict cash-only policy--which can mean they need to get paid in cash.
At Ollmann’s old law enforcement job, one employee didn’t get paid, but vaguely “traded his services for other services.”
“A barter system starts to appear if you want to live without being tracked,” Ollmann says.
AS I SEE IT...
WE HAVE GIVEN UP OUR FREEDOMS AND OUR RIGHT TO PRIVACY OF OUR OWN FREE WILL.
WE HAVE JUST "ROLLED OVER AND TAKEN IT" FOR SO LONG THAT WE KNOW NO OTHER WAY.
WE ARE WILLING TO BE KEPT LIKE FOOD ANIMALS IN A PEN FOR HOWEVER LONG OUR FEEDERS" WANT TO FEED US UNTIL THEY ARE READY TO BE FED...BY US.
WE ARE USED, WE ARE ABUSED, WE ARE INVADED INTO OUR MOST PRIVATE DOMAINS AND INTO THE VERY RECESSES OF OUR MINDS.
MANY WILL READ THIS AND SAY, "OH, I DIDN'T KNOW! HEY! THEY CAN'T DO THAT TO ME!"
BUT THEN MAYBE ONE, MAYBE NONE, WILL ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS NEW KNOWLEDGE.
WE HAVE BEEN REPROGRAMMED OVER OUR ENTIRE LIFETIMES TO BECOME DOCILE LITTLE SHEEP, TO BLINDLY TRUST, TO MEEKLY FOLLOW, TO NEVER QUESTION, AND TO KEEP PROVIDING SUSTENANCE TO OUR SHEPHERDS...WHO LEAD US OFF TO MARKET, WHISTLING ALL THE WAY, THEN LAUGH ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK ONCE WE ARE SOLD TO THE HIGHEST BIDDERS.
THAT'S "JUST THE WAY IT IS....NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT...YOU CAN'T FIGHT CITY HALL...."
HAVE YOU TRIED TO FIGHT CITY HALL?
BAAAAAAAA, baaaaaaaaa, baaaaaaaa....
TO "MAINSTREAM MEDIA"...
TOO MUCH WHISTLE-BLOWING, TOO MUCH INFORMATION TO INCITE THE SHEEP TO RIOT.
IT'S SORT OF LIKE GEORGE (I CAN'T EVEN READ BY PHONICS ON MY TELEPROMPTER) BUSH, Jr, CALLING EVERY AMERICAN WHO DIDN'T AGREE WITH HIM A "POSSIBLE TERRORIST" AND "UNAMERICAN".
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.
~Edward R. Murrow
AND, SINCE WE GAVE UP OUR RIGHT TO PRIVACY AND ALL OUR CONSTITUTIONAL FREEDOMS..THEY MAY AS WELL HAVE THIS, YES?
OR, AS THE IMMORTAL JANIS JOPLIN SAID:
"I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it,
Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!
You know you got it if it makes you feel good..."
LIST OF DATA BROKERS
Here’s a cubic ton of data brokers, direct marketers and data aggregation services, with links to how you can opt your digits out of their databases.
JUST GO TO THE WEBSITE TO FIND CLICKABLE LINKS TO EACH & EVERY ONE OF THESE ON THE LIST: [ http://consumerist.com/2010/06/21/giant-list-of-data-brokers-to-opt-out-of/ ]
YES, DEAR SHEEPLE, ALL OF THESE THAT YOU TRUSTED ARE SELLING YOUR PERSONAL DATA!
SURPRISE!!!
DATA BROKERS
Ameridex
BeenVerified
Email Finder
InfoPay EmailTracer
Intelius, Inc.
LocatePeople.org
LocatePLUS
MelissaData.com
Merlin Information Services
PeopleFinders.com
Peoplelookup.com
PeopleSearchNow.com
People Search Pro
Phone Detective
PrivateEye
PublicBackgroundChecks.com
PublicRecordsNOW
USA People Search
US Search.com
Veromi.net
Westlaw
ZABA Inc.
Marketers, Direct Mail
Abacus Cooperative
Acxiom Corporation
Aristotle / Voter Lists Online
ChoicePoint Precision Marketing
Cox Target Media (Valpak)
DirectMail.com
DMAChoice
Dun & Bradstreet, Inc.
Epsilon Data Management, LLC
Haines Criss+Cross
Infogroup Inc.
LexisNexis
Money Mailer
Publishers Clearing House
Reader’s Digest
Suarez Corporation Industries
Valassis Communications, Inc.
People Directories
411.com
AnyWho
DA Plus
Fone Cart
Google Phonebook
infoUSA411.com
InfoSpace
Lycos
People Finder
PhoneNumber.com
Superpages.com
SwitchBoard
WhitePages Inc
Social Networks, Data Aggregators
123people.com
iSearch
PeekYou.com
Pipl
Radaris
Spock.com
Spokeo Inc.
Wink Technologies, Inc
Zoom Information Inc
Opt Out of Telemarketers
National Do Not Call Registry
Reduce Unsolicited Mail/Offers
Catalog Choice
Opt Out Services LLC
Opt out of Online Advertising
Network Advertising Initiative
Google’s DoubleClick
Microsoft Advertising