What Is a Data Broker?
A data broker is a company whose primary business is collecting personal information about consumers from a variety of sources, aggregating and analyzing it, and sharing it for purposes such as marketing, identity verification or fraud detection. That wording comes from the Federal Trade Commission’s 2014 report Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability. The key detail is in the same report: brokers generally gather this data without interacting directly with the people it describes.
Where the data comes from
The FTC found that brokers draw on commercial, government and other publicly available sources. Think voter registration, property and court records, purchase data and warranty registrations. Brokers also buy from each other, which is how one record proliferates across dozens of places.
My short version, from my kidnapping article, is that the sites get your information everywhere. Public data is scraped from local registries, court documents, digitized phone books and voter rolls. Then it is combined with data bought from private aggregators.
Not every broker is a people-search site
Most people meet data brokers through people-search sites, because those are the ones with a search box. Many brokers never face consumers at all. They sell to marketers, lenders, insurers and other businesses. A removal request to one site does nothing about the others.
Who regulates them
There is no single federal rulebook for brokers. Several states run registries instead: California, Vermont, Texas and Oregon all require brokers to register. A registry tells you who has signed up. It does not tell you who is operating without registering.
California went further. Its Delete Act created DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform. California residents can file one deletion request that goes to every registered broker. The state’s privacy agency says brokers must begin processing those requests on August 1, 2026, and the service is free to residents. If you live in California, use it. If you don’t, you are still doing this one broker at a time. See right to erasure for the legal background.
What removal does and doesn’t do
Removal works on a given record at a given time. Brokers re-ingest public records, so a removed listing can reappear. That is why removal alone is not a plan. A privacy broker treats it as one step among several, alongside de-indexing and data poisoning.
If you want the third-party options with their listed prices, I compared them in data broker removal service vs DIY tools.
Sources
- Federal Trade Commission, Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability, May 2014.
- California Privacy Protection Agency, Information for Data Brokers, checked October 22, 2026.