What information do data brokers have about you?

If you have ever owned a home, registered to vote, signed up for a loyalty card, or simply browsed the internet, data brokers almost certainly have a file on you. These companies compile personal information from public records, commercial transactions, social media, and dozens of other sources into detailed dossiers that they sell to marketers, background check companies, private investigators, and anyone else willing to pay.

The scope of what they collect is broad. A single listing can contain more than 40 distinct data points spanning your identity, finances, relationships, habits, and even inferred health conditions.

Contact & identity

This is the foundation of every listing. Your identity data is the most widely held, most frequently sold, and most easily verified category of information in the broker industry.

• Full legal name: including all historical names, maiden names, married names, and known aliases. Brokers track every name you have ever used on a public record.
• Current and historical addresses: typically going back 20+ years. Every apartment, house, and PO box you have ever been associated with through utility records, voter registrations, or property filings.
• Phone numbers: cell, landline, and VoIP. Brokers buy phone data from app SDKs, data aggregators, and commercial databases. Multiple numbers are common, including ones you no longer use.
• Email addresses: personal, work, and old accounts. Email data is harvested from data breaches, commercial partners, public filings, and website registrations.
• Social media handles: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and other platforms. Scraped from public profiles or purchased from third-party data brokers who specialize in social media intelligence.
• Profile photos: pulled from social media, professional directories, and public records. Some brokers display these alongside your personal details.

Demographic information

Beyond your name and address, brokers assemble a detailed demographic profile that advertisers and screening companies use to categorize you. Some of these fields are sourced from public records, but many are inferred using statistical models.

• Age and birth year: sourced from voter registration, property records, and commercial databases. Often accurate to the exact year.
• Gender: inferred from first name or sourced from records. Not always accurate, especially for gender-neutral names.
• Race and ethnicity: typically inferred from name, neighborhood demographics, and purchasing patterns. This inference is inherently problematic and frequently wrong.
• Marital status: sourced from marriage and divorce records, property deeds with co-owners, and consumer surveys.
• Household composition: how many people live at your address, including estimated number of children, based on consumer data and address history.
• Household income range: estimated using a combination of property values, neighborhood data, job title, and purchasing patterns. Typically expressed as a range (e.g., $75K–$100K).
• Net worth estimate: a modeled figure combining property ownership, vehicle registrations, investment indicators, and income estimates.

Family & social graph

Data brokers know who you are, and who you are connected to. This relational data is built by linking records at shared addresses, matching surnames, and purchasing relationship data from commercial sources.

• Relatives by name: parents, siblings, children, and extended family. Identified through shared addresses, surname matching, and public records like birth certificates and marriage licenses.
• Roommates and cohabitants: past and present. Anyone who has shared an address with you appears as an "associate" in broker databases.
• Neighbors: current and former. Brokers cross-reference address databases to map your neighborhood connections.
• Associates: people who appear in the same records as you, including business filings, court documents, and shared properties.
• Employers of household members: your spouse's or roommate's workplace can appear on your profile through shared address records.

This social graph means that your data exposure affects the people around you. When a broker has your profile, they also have a partial map of your family and social network.

Financial indicators

Financial data is among the most valuable information brokers sell. While they rarely have exact bank balances, they assemble a surprisingly detailed picture of your financial standing from public filings and commercial data sources.

• Property ownership: every property you own or have owned, sourced from county assessor and deed records. Includes purchase date, sale price, and current assessed value.
• Estimated home value: current market estimate based on comparable sales, tax assessments, and property characteristics.
• Mortgage status: whether you have a mortgage, the originating lender, and sometimes the approximate loan amount, all from county recorder filings.
• Bankruptcy filings: Chapter 7, Chapter 11, and Chapter 13 filings from federal court records. These remain on listings for 7–10 years or longer.
• Tax liens: federal and state tax liens filed against your property, sourced from county records.
• Civil judgments: court-ordered payments from lawsuits, including the amount and the parties involved.
• Business ownership: any LLC, corporation, or DBA you have registered, pulled from secretary of state filings.
• Investment indicators: inferred "investor" status based on property portfolio, income estimates, and purchasing behavior. Some brokers sell an "estimated investment portfolio range."

Employment & education

Your professional history is tracked through a combination of public records, commercial databases, and data purchased from professional networking sites and resume aggregators.

• Current employer and job title: sourced from professional directories, LinkedIn scraping, and commercial databases like Dun & Bradstreet.
• Previous employers: a chronological work history assembled from multiple data sources over years.
• Education level: highest degree completed, often inferred from consumer surveys or sourced from alumni directories.
• University attended: specific institutions, sometimes including graduation year.
• Professional licenses: state-issued licenses (medical, legal, real estate, etc.) sourced directly from licensing board databases.

Behavior & interests

This category is where data brokerage becomes particularly invasive. By purchasing transaction data, tracking online behavior, and buying information from app developers, brokers build detailed profiles of what you buy, read, believe, and care about.

• Purchase history categories: not individual transactions, but spending patterns: "luxury goods buyer," "organic food purchaser," "online electronics shopper." Sourced from loyalty programs, credit card transaction aggregators, and retail data cooperatives.
• Magazine subscriptions: historically one of the earliest commercial data sources. Subscription lists are still sold and traded.
• Charitable donations: nonprofit donor lists are routinely bought and sold. Your donations to specific causes become data points in your profile.
• Political donations: all donations over $200 to federal candidates are public record via FEC filings. Brokers combine this with voter registration data.
• Political party registration: sourced directly from state voter files, which are available for purchase in most states.
• Religious affiliation: inferred from donation patterns, organizational memberships, and consumer survey responses.
• Gun ownership: inferred from magazine subscriptions, purchase categories, and hunting/fishing license records in states that make them available.

Location history

Mobile apps that request location permissions generate a continuous stream of precise GPS data. This data is sold by app developers to location data brokers, who repackage it for advertisers, hedge funds, and government agencies.

• Home address and work address: determined by analyzing where your phone spends nights and weekday business hours.
• Frequently visited locations: the grocery store you prefer, the gym you attend, restaurants you frequent, and the routes you take between them.
• Travel patterns: trips, hotel stays, and airport visits, all inferred from location pings.
• Retail visits: which stores you walk into and how long you stay. Some location data brokers can determine which aisle of a store you visited.

Location data is among the most sensitive categories because it can reveal things you have never told anyone: visits to medical specialists, houses of worship, political rallies, or the homes of people you know.

Health & lifestyle (inferred)

Data brokers generally do not have access to your medical records directly (HIPAA restricts that), but they build health-related profiles through inference. These inferred health attributes are sold to insurance companies, pharmaceutical marketers, and employers.

• Diet preferences: inferred from grocery loyalty card data and purchase patterns (vegan, gluten-free, organic, etc.).
• Fitness activity: sourced from wearable device data shared with third-party apps, gym membership records, and fitness app usage.
• Prescription drug categories: pharmacy benefit managers and data cooperatives sell anonymized (but often re-identifiable) prescription data. Brokers categorize people as "diabetes sufferer" or "cholesterol medication user."
• Pregnancy likelihood: inferred from purchasing patterns (prenatal vitamins, baby registry creation, maternity clothing). This was famously demonstrated by Target's prediction model, but data brokers have been doing it for decades.
• Disability indicators: inferred from purchases of accessibility equipment, participation in disability organizations, or public benefit records.
• Smoking and alcohol use: inferred from purchase patterns, loyalty card data, and consumer survey responses.

Legal history

Court records are public in the United States, and data brokers systematically harvest them from federal, state, and county court systems. This data follows you for years or decades, even when charges are dropped or records should have been expunged.

• Arrest records: including charges that were dropped, dismissed, or resulted in acquittal. Many brokers do not update records after a favorable disposition.
• Criminal convictions: misdemeanors and felonies, sourced from state court databases.
• Civil lawsuits: both as plaintiff and defendant, including case summaries and amounts.
• Restraining orders: sourced from court filings, these can appear on background check reports even if the order was temporary.
• Eviction records: filed eviction proceedings, regardless of outcome, sourced from county courts and tenant screening databases.
• DUI records: driving under the influence arrests and convictions from DMV records and court filings.
• Sex offender registry: pulled directly from state and national registries. Prominently displayed on people-search sites.
• Federal court records: PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) data, including federal civil and criminal cases.

The persistence of legal records in broker databases is particularly harmful. Arrest records from decades ago, charges that were dismissed, and expunged records that should no longer be public all continue to surface in people-search results and background checks.

The sample profile

To illustrate the scope of data broker collection, here is what a typical profile looks like when all the categories above are combined into a single record. The data below represents a fictional individual, but the structure and level of detail are representative of what brokers actually hold.

Data broker profile, aggregated record

High Exposure

This is roughly 35 distinct data points about a single person, assembled from public records, commercial data, and statistical inference. Most Americans have profiles like this on 50 to 100 different broker sites. Each site sells access to this data, typically for $1 to $30 per lookup.

How accurate is this data?

There is no trustworthy error rate for the data-broker industry as a whole. Providers use different sources, products, and definitions of accuracy. Documented problems include:

• Wrong names attached to your record: people with similar names get merged into a single profile, mixing your data with a stranger's
• Outdated employers and job titles: brokers rarely update employment data proactively, so your profile may show a job you left years ago
• Incorrect addresses: typos in public records propagate across broker databases without correction
• Merged profiles: father and son with the same name, or people with common names in the same city, often get combined into a single record
• Stale phone numbers and emails: contact data from 10 or 15 years ago remains listed as "current"

Quality controls vary by broker and product. The FTC has found that brokers may evaluate sources and use automated reconciliation and matching rules, but those methods cannot guarantee that a record is current or belongs to the right person. Legal duties also depend on use: FCRA-covered consumer reports are subject to federal accuracy and dispute requirements that do not apply in the same way to every general-purpose lookup.

This matters most when information is used in a consequential decision. The CFPB has documented tenant-screening problems involving records that belonged to someone else and outdated or misleading court information. If an FCRA-covered report contributes to an adverse decision, consumers have disclosure and dispute rights.

What you can do

Understanding the scope of data broker collection is the first step. Here is what you can do next:

• Check your own exposure: run a free scan to see which brokers currently have your personal information and what they are displaying
• Remove yourself from data broker sites: our step-by-step guide covers the opt-out process for major brokers, or let Delist handle it for you
• Minimize future data collection: practical steps to reduce the amount of new data flowing to brokers going forward

The data broker industry relies on the fact that most people do not know the extent of their exposure. Now that you do, you have the information you need to act.

Frequently asked questions