How your data is collected and commoditised via “free” online services
He&#x27;s on the right track, but absolutely wrong about where the bulk of this data comes from.<p>It&#x27;s not shady &quot;Take a free trip!&quot; websites.<p>It&#x27;s your Dominoes Pizza order, it&#x27;s your trip to Target, it&#x27;s everything you do. (A sales person for one of the big companies listed those specific groups, but said it was basically everyone.)<p>The big companies in the industry (LexisNexis, Thompson Reuters&#x27; CLEAR) buy everyone&#x27;s data. Anything they can get their hands on.<p>As far as I can tell, everyone in the country&#x27;s data is being stored; everywhere you have ever lived, all of your phone numbers, voting records, debts, legal history, marriages, past names and aliases, email addresses, everything.<p>It&#x27;s all in a handful of huge private systems. Systems that were originally marketed to law enforcement agencies, but are now being shopped to private companies as well. Insant CheckMate is just a tiny tiny fraction of what is actually captured by these data brokers.<p>Source: You&#x27;ll have to take my word for it.<p>Interesting tidbit -- They have alerts setup in the system; E.g. if you search for the wrong person you&#x27;ll get a call from headquarters asking why you&#x27;re pulling up Kanye West&#x27;s home phone number, etc.