§ TECH · 2 MIN READ
Delete Yourself From the Data Brokers
Hundreds of companies you have never heard of sell your address, your relatives and your phone number. California now runs one request that reaches all of them.
By Culture
THE SHORT VERSION
Data brokers are companies that collect and resell personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers, relatives and property records, without ever interacting with the people they profile. California residents can now file a single deletion request through the state privacy agency that registered brokers are required to honour, rather than opting out of each broker individually.
Search your own name and your city. Not on a social platform, on a plain search engine.
Somewhere in the first two pages there is a site offering your age, your previous addresses, your phone number, and a list of people described as your relatives. You never signed up for it. You have probably never heard of the company.
That is a data broker, and there are hundreds.
The usual response is that none of it is secret. That is true and it is not the point. The harm is in the assembly.
Your address on its own is nothing. Your address, your phone number, your mother's name, your last four addresses and your approximate income assembled into one record and sold for a few dollars is the raw material for every social engineering call your family will ever receive.
It is how somebody calls your grandmother and knows your name. It is how a stalker finds a new address in an afternoon. It is how a scam call stops sounding like a scam call.
California now requires registered data brokers to honour deletion requests submitted through a single system run by the state privacy agency, rather than forcing residents to file with each company separately.
That is the fastest legitimate option available to anyone in this state and it takes a few minutes. Go to the California Privacy Protection Agency site, find the deletion request system, and register. Brokers registered with the state are required to process it.
Do not pay a service to do this for you before trying the free state system first.
If you are outside California, or you want to reach sites that are not registered, the work is manual but finite.
Search your name plus your city. Open the results that are broker listings. Each one has an opt-out or do-not-sell page, usually in the footer, usually deliberately unpleasant to find. Submit the request. Some will email you a confirmation link, which is the part people abandon.
Do the ten that actually surface for your name. That is where the real exposure is. Chasing all several hundred is not a good use of a life.
“The address is public. The dossier is the product.”
Freeze your credit. A deleted broker record does not stop somebody opening an account in your name. The freeze takes about fifteen minutes and is free, and it is the single highest-value thing on this page.
Turn on two-step sign-in everywhere that holds money. Brokers supply the answers to security questions.
Tell the people who will be called. The record about you is used against your family more often than against you. Scam-proofing the people you love is a conversation, not a setting.
Deletion is not permanent. Brokers re-collect from public records, and a record deleted in March can exist again by autumn.
Set a reminder twice a year, search your name, and redo the ones that came back. Fifteen minutes, twice a year, forever. That is the actual maintenance cost of not being in a stranger's spreadsheet.
- What is a data broker?
- A company that collects personal records from public filings, purchases and other sources, assembles them into profiles, and resells them. You never interact with them directly, and the profile exists whether or not you have used their site.
- Can I delete my data from all brokers at once?
- California residents can file one deletion request through the state privacy agency that registered brokers must honour. Outside California the process is per company, through each site's own opt-out page.
- Does deleting my data keep it gone permanently?
- No. Brokers re-collect from public records, so records reappear. Re-checking roughly twice a year is the realistic maintenance.
