The Data Broker Problem
I Googled my own name a while back and found my home address, phone number, and a list of my relatives on a site called Spokeo. I'd never signed up for it. Never even heard of it. That was my introduction to data brokers - companies like WhitePages, BeenVerified, and Intelius that scrape public records, purchase histories, and app data, then package it all into profiles they sell to basically anyone.
There are over 4,000 of these companies operating in the US alone. They sell your full name, home address, phone number, email, estimated income, and even your relatives' names to marketers, insurance companies, background check services, and random people willing to pay a few bucks. It's a billion-dollar industry built entirely on your personal information.
If you use a laptop - especially one you carry between home, work, coffee shops, and airports - you're generating more data than most people. Every network you connect to, every browser-based service you log into, every online purchase. All of it feeds the data broker pipeline.
Can You Do This Yourself? (Yes, but...)
Technically, yes. Under the CCPA in California and GDPR in Europe, data brokers are legally required to honor opt-out requests. I tried doing this manually for about a dozen sites - here's what that actually looks like in practice:
You Google your name, find your profile on Spokeo, dig around their site for the opt-out page (it's buried), submit a removal request, verify your email, and then wait 2-6 weeks. Then you do the same thing on WhitePages. Then BeenVerified. Then Intelius. Then TruePeopleSearch. You get the idea. There are hundreds of these sites.
I got through maybe 8 before I ran out of patience. Some wanted a photo of my government ID just to process the request, which felt ironic - handing over more personal data to get my personal data removed.
The Better Option: Let Incogni Handle It
After giving up on the manual approach, I tried Incogni. The setup took about two minutes - name, email, address - and then it just started working. Within the first week, the dashboard showed removal requests sent to over 100 brokers, and I could actually see which ones had my data (way more than I expected).
The thing that sold me was the re-monitoring. When Spokeo re-listed me a couple months later, Incogni caught it and sent another removal request without me doing anything. That's the part you can't realistically do yourself.
It covers 180+ data brokers across the US, UK, EU, Canada, and Switzerland. It's built by Surfshark, the same company behind the VPN. The annual plan works out to $6.49/month, or $12.99 if you go monthly. Not cheap, but cheaper than the hours you'd spend doing it manually and way more effective since it keeps working after the initial cleanup.
If you've already set up a VPN, this handles the other half - cleaning up the data that's already out there.
