Good to know. I looked it up around when I asked and it looks like there’s a couple websites in the US you can try to opt out on but one requires a SSN and a fee, so I’m skeptical.
Hmm… that reminds me, there may be something w.r.t. direct marketing. Marketers have to get your address and pay postage to junk mail you in the US. That only deters the most reckless marketing efforts. For some ad companies it is worth the postage cost. So then they have to get your address, which means buying your address from a data broker. You can probably pay a fee to get removed from some databases that feed junk mailers.
Data protection is mostly non-existent in the US. So there are countless data brokers that are happy to sell you a removal service. Some data brokers will even remove your records at no cost. But the number of data brokers would require you to quit your job in order to have time to make all the removal requests and constantly monitor new data brokers. So there are services that remove your records from a bulk number of data brokers, for a fee. I think it’s normal that they want your SSN because that’s the primary key for everything. But yeah, it’s a double-edged sword because you have to trust the cleaning company with your SSN and you can’t really know if that SSN just ends up enriching the records of some of the more black market data brokers.
Good to know. I looked it up around when I asked and it looks like there’s a couple websites in the US you can try to opt out on but one requires a SSN and a fee, so I’m skeptical.
Hmm… that reminds me, there may be something w.r.t. direct marketing. Marketers have to get your address and pay postage to junk mail you in the US. That only deters the most reckless marketing efforts. For some ad companies it is worth the postage cost. So then they have to get your address, which means buying your address from a data broker. You can probably pay a fee to get removed from some databases that feed junk mailers.
Data protection is mostly non-existent in the US. So there are countless data brokers that are happy to sell you a removal service. Some data brokers will even remove your records at no cost. But the number of data brokers would require you to quit your job in order to have time to make all the removal requests and constantly monitor new data brokers. So there are services that remove your records from a bulk number of data brokers, for a fee. I think it’s normal that they want your SSN because that’s the primary key for everything. But yeah, it’s a double-edged sword because you have to trust the cleaning company with your SSN and you can’t really know if that SSN just ends up enriching the records of some of the more black market data brokers.