What Do Data Brokers Know About You?
Data brokers build shockingly detailed profiles on nearly every American adult. They know your name, every address you have lived at, your phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, estimated income, political donations, court records, and more. You never gave them permission. Here is what they have and where they get it.
Last updated March 18, 2026
> What to do
- 1
Search your name on a data broker site
Go to TruePeopleSearch.com (it is completely free) and look yourself up. What you see is a preview of what data brokers know. Full addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, age, and a list of your relatives. This is just one of dozens of sites with your data.
- 2
Run a comprehensive broker check
Checking brokers one by one takes hours. A people search on EXPOSE checks all the major brokers at once: Spokeo, WhitePages, BeenVerified, Radaris, Intelius, PeopleFinder, and more. You get a single report showing every broker that has your data and what they are publishing.
- 3
Understand what data they collect
Brokers collect your full name, current and past addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, age, date of birth, relatives and associates, property ownership, court records, political donations, professional licenses, estimated income, and education history. Some also track your online purchase behavior and social media activity.
- 4
Learn where they get it
Most broker data comes from public records: property deeds, voter registrations, court filings, business registrations, and professional licenses. They supplement this with marketing databases, loyalty program data, and social media scraping. You never agreed to be profiled, but the underlying data is legally public.
- 5
Request your full profile from brokers
Under California's CCPA and similar state laws, you can request a copy of all data a broker holds on you. Spokeo, Acxiom, and other large brokers have data access request forms. What they send back is often eye-opening. It is usually far more detailed than what they show on their public profiles.
- 6
Start opting out
Once you know which brokers have your data, submit opt-out requests to each one. Start with the biggest and most trafficked sites. An EXPOSE report includes direct links to each broker's opt-out page and tells you what to expect from each process.
> The data broker business model
Data brokers make money by selling your personal information. Their customers include marketers, recruiters, skip tracers, private investigators, debt collectors, and unfortunately, stalkers and scammers. A single people search lookup costs $1 to $30 depending on how much detail is included. With profiles on over 200 million Americans, even a small broker generates millions in revenue. The data is cheap to collect (most of it is public) and expensive to buy (because it is aggregated and searchable). That profit motive is why they fight removal requests and re-list your data as fast as they can.
> SCAN_NOW
See your data broker profiles right now
EXPOSE searches all major data broker sites and shows you exactly what personal information they are publishing about you.