Now, the truth is that if you have been using the internet for quite some time, chances are that there is a lot of information about you online. Consciously or not, you’ve been uploading a lot of personal data and you might not have even realized it. There are certain companies called data brokers which are designated to collect every single bit of information which there is on you and then sell it to interested third parties.
So how does it work?
It’s quite simple when you come to think about it. Right off the bat, data brokers are doing nothing illegal – this is something that you need to understand. Just on the opposite – everything they do is thoroughly regulated. The main trick here is that they are collecting information which you have made public and you have shared.
For instance, just think about how much information your Facebook profile contains. There is your birth date, address, family ties, workplace, and previous workplace – basically everything that you have decided to fill in. This information is particularly valuable for a lot of different companies and that’s what data brokers do – they collect it and then they sell it to those who are interested.
But who may be interested?
As we mentioned right on top – there are a lot of companies which might be very interested in knowing as much about you as it’s possible. For example, marketing companies rely on big data in order conduct their marketing campaigns and to do so for their customers. This is where data brokers come into the picture.
Let us give you an example. Imagine a company which sells engineering gear – something which is useful only to engineers. A marketing company is going to start thinking of ways to pitch this to people who have background in engineering. Publishing in engineering websites and magazines, however, might be expensive and it’s rather unreliable in terms of turnarounds and conversions. What if there was a way to go ahead and find a huge data base which contains the details of people who are occupied in this field. Well, that’s what data brokers do – they find different people and they categorize their information.
So the data broker is going to compile a huge amount of engineers and it’s going to sort this information based on current locations, age-groups, seniority, experience and what not. All of this information is already on the internet thanks to your social and professional media profiles on websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, for example.
This is how the marketing company gets the information that it needs – it buys off your information in a bundle with millions of others. This is how they manage to increase their chances of significant success in their marketing endeavors.
Is this dangerous?
As far as marketing campaigns and other social surveys go – this is completely harmless. Sure, you will get a lot of emails about things that you might not be interested in but every now and then you might even find something which is rather useful.
However, data brokers are not the only entities which would stalk the internet, crawling for your information. Everyone who would have a certain purpose of using your personal information might benefit from the Internet and their intentions might not always be good.
This is where you want to be very careful. Identity theft is a thing and it’s dangerous now more than ever before. And, the main source of information when it comes to endeavors of the kind has and will always be the internet. So, what to do?
- Be Careful
Just because it’s Facebook, it doesn’t really need to contain all of your information. Sure, you can include what is it that you are working now but there is no need to put an exact location. At the same time, you don’t need to input your own private address on your profile. Sure, putting in your city and country is going to be enough and there is no need for something else.
- Change passwords
Never use the same password for different applications. The logic is particularly obvious – if someone manages to crack it wide open – he will have access to all of the apps using this password. Sure, it might be hard and even impossible to use different passwords and to remember them all but when it comes to it, you might want to use a password manager or a vault app. It’s nothing to be concerned with and it comes with a lot of advantages.
- Be mindful when you input personal data
If you want to ensure that there is not a lot of information about you online, you shouldn’t upload it. This doesn’t only go to your social media profiles. If you’ve been using the internet for quite some time then it’s highly likely that you’ve used a lot of online shopping venues. This is where you upload essential credit information. You need to be particularly careful when you do so in order to ensure that everything is handled as per the highest standards.
Of course, if there is a lot about you online already there is not a lot that you can actually do. You need to ensure that you remove everything there is but that’s not an easy task. As soon as you have uploaded your information, chances are that it has been picked up by quite a lot of different data brokers as there is a tremendous amount of companies on the market that do just that. With this in mind, it’s important to ensure that everything is handled as per the highest industry standards and get a data Removal Company like ours. We will make sure that whatever it is online is removed and that it’s not uploaded again – this is an important consideration that you need to take into account if you want to ensure that your remain private in a world in which it’s increasingly hard to do so.
