Title: Please excuse the frustrated tone; the &quot;secrecy&quot; all over the internet about the whole issue has been driving me insane.<p>The usual useless BS is &quot;oh, these companies get it from governmental public records&quot;. Yeah, right. I&#x27;m pretty <i>darn</i> sure that some of the personal information I can find online on MyLife, Intelius, InstantCheckmate, Spokeo, etc. is not in some government agency&#x27;s public record, and regardless, surely there&#x27;s no way that hundreds of companies are repeating each others&#x27; work over and over again when they could just buy the information from someone.<p><i>Someone</i> (or a few) hidden underneath has to be doing the heavy-lifting of scraping people&#x27;s data from sketchy sources and selling them to third-party companies while staying hidden. My question is, who are these, and (where it is possible to know) whom are they selling to? How can I find out? Surely someone knows, and I&#x27;m tired of playing this goose chase where those who <i>don&#x27;t</i> know just make random guesses as to how the information must be coming from some some public records, and those who do know say hardly anything beyond &quot;you have to know where to look&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not looking for just 1 pointer, though I would appreciate it. I&#x27;m tired of pointer chasing. I&#x27;m just looking for as comprehensive a list as possible. It <i>has</i> to exist somewhere... after all, when a court needs to order that someone&#x27;s information be purged (for whatever reason, e.g. for safety), it&#x27;s <i>got</i> to have a list of these data aggregators somewhere, so I&#x27;m sure some people must know. So how do I find out? I&#x27;m hoping to also learn to fish in addition to being given the fish.<p>Thank you!
Upvote: