Avast blog: It ain’t easy to remove your personal data from the brokers

I tried to remove my own data recently and found it to be a very frustrating online rabbit hole. You will find either task to be nearly impossible and, sadly, this is by intent and by design: They charge by the gigabyte and aren’t paid for being accurate. And you don’t pay them anything, so you aren’t really the customer; you are just the unwilling victim. 

Note: these brokers are the legitimate side of selling your data, and not to be confused with the dark web illegal side, such as the recent scraping of 700M LinkedIn users. FIghting that is for another post.

I started out my own quest by submitting removal requests for my data to three places: Epsilon, Experian, and Intelius. I picked these somewhat at random, but the trio gives you a good idea of what you are in for. My journey through this looking glass is chronicled for my latest blog post for Avast here.

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