If you haven't heard about data brokers yet, you're going to start hearing more about them in the news. John Oliver, late night host on HBO, recently committed and entire segment to educating his viewers on data brokers and the dangers they pose to all internet users.
The same websites that do background checks or people lookups are data brokers. BeenVerified, fastpeoplesearch, Intelius, etc. These are all data brokers who collect your personal information - name, phone number, home address - and sell it online for a profit. And they do it all without your permission.
These data brokers will do anything to get your information. Whenever you sell a house, get hired or fired, graduate, get arrested, or any other life event, these data brokers will find the records of that event and update your information in their database. This makes is extremely easy for stalkers, spammers, and scammers to get ahold of your information.
This poses numerous risks. Scammers can pretend to be you and register credit cards in your name. All they have to do is purchase your information from a data broker, then they can easily pretend to be you. The same goes for identity theft.
The scariest threat is if you have a family with kids on the internet. You never know what creeper is going to stalk them online and find out where you live. And these days you can find out where anyone lives with the click of a button.
The good old days of privacy are gone. We live in a very public internet era where everybody's personal information and misdeeds are exposed online whether they like it or not. Privacy is dead, and that's scary.
But what if I told you there was a way to fight back and regain your privacy. Last year a genius new start up decided to take the fight to these data brokers. Called PrivacyOn, this startup did the opposite of data brokers. Instead of collecting and selling your data, it removes and deletes your personal information from the internet. It's the ultimate privacy service available on the internet.
This new data remover may be just what society needs to regain "the right to privacy." The golden days of privacy, pre-internet, may be back thanks to data removers like PrivacyOn who are fighting back and winning your privacy rights.