What Is a Data Broker?

The Short Definition

That definition covers a surprisingly wide range of companies. The people-search site that shows your home address to anyone who Googles your name is a data broker. So is the marketing analytics firm that tells a retailer you are likely pregnant based on your purchasing patterns. So is the risk assessment company that helps an insurer decide how much to charge you for car insurance.

What they all share: they profit from your personal information, and you are not their customer — you are their product.

A Day in the Life of Your Data

To understand data brokers, it helps to trace how a single piece of your information moves through the system.

Say you buy allergy medicine at a pharmacy. You swipe your loyalty card at checkout because it saves you $2. That transaction — what you bought, when, and at which location — gets recorded in the pharmacy's database. Within days, that purchase data is sold to a data aggregator, one of the large companies that buys transaction records from thousands of retailers.

The aggregator matches your loyalty card to your real identity using your name, address, and phone number (the same information you gave when you signed up for the card). They add this purchase to your consumer profile, which already contains hundreds of other data points: your estimated income, your home's square footage, how many cars you own, your political party registration, and whether you have children.

Meanwhile, a people-search site has pulled your voter registration record, your property deed, and your marriage license from public records databases. They match these to a phone number sourced from a data-sharing agreement with a mobile app you installed three years ago. Your profile now shows your full name, age, current and past addresses, phone number, email address, relatives' names, and estimated net worth — all available to anyone who searches for you.

None of these companies asked your permission. None of them notified you. And in most U.S. states, none of them broke any law.

The Three Categories of Data Broker

Data brokers are not a monolith. They fall into three broad categories, each serving different buyers with different products.

1. People-Search and Identity Brokers

These are the most visible type of data broker — sites like Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, and Radaris that let anyone look up a person by name, phone number, or address. They aggregate public records (voter rolls, property deeds, court filings) with commercially acquired data (phone records, email addresses, social media profiles) to build detailed dossiers on individuals.

What they sell: Individual profile reports containing names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, neighbors, criminal records, and sometimes employment history and estimated income. Prices range from free (basic info) to $30 or more for a full background report.

Who buys: Anyone. Landlords screening tenants, employers running informal background checks, people reconnecting with old friends, private investigators, stalkers, scammers, and marketers. No verification of identity or purpose is required.

What you can do: Most people-search sites offer an opt-out process where you can request removal of your profile. The catch is that there are dozens of these sites, each has a different removal process, and your data typically reappears within 30 to 90 days as the broker re-ingests from its sources. See our removal guide.

2. Marketing Data Brokers

Companies like Acxiom (now Liveramp), Oracle Data Cloud, and Epsilon don't sell individual profiles. Instead, they sell audience segments — groups of consumers categorized by demographics, interests, purchasing behavior, and predicted intent. A segment might be "new parents in suburban zip codes with household income above $80,000 who recently searched for SUVs."

What they sell: Consumer segments, behavioral profiles, and targeting data. Products include lookalike audience modeling, identity resolution (matching your offline identity to your online activity), and real-time bidding data for digital advertising.

Who buys: Advertisers, retailers, political campaigns, and media companies. If you have ever seen an ad that felt eerily specific to your life situation, marketing data brokers are likely the reason.

What you can do: Some marketing data brokers offer opt-out mechanisms, but they are harder to find and less effective than people-search opt-outs. Industry self-regulation through the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) provides a limited opt-out at YourAdChoices.com, but it only covers interest-based advertising, not underlying data collection.

3. Risk and Fraud Data Brokers

Companies like LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Verisk, and TransUnion (through its non-FCRA products) sell risk scores, fraud detection signals, and identity verification data. They serve industries where assessing a person's risk profile is central to the business decision.

What they sell: Risk scores for insurance pricing, fraud probability scores, identity verification checks, claims history databases, and "consumer risk indicators" derived from public records and commercial data.

Who buys: Insurance companies, banks, lenders, landlords, and employers. Your auto insurance premium, apartment application outcome, and even job candidacy can be influenced by data from these brokers.

What you can do: When these companies act as consumer reporting agencies (providing data used for credit, insurance, or employment decisions), they are regulated under FCRA and must allow you to dispute inaccurate information. But much of their data is sold for purposes that fall outside FCRA's scope, where your rights are far more limited.

The Scale of the Industry

The data brokerage industry is enormous, largely invisible, and growing. A few numbers illustrate the scope:

• $240 billion — the estimated annual revenue of the global data broker industry, according to industry research firm IBISWorld and reporting by the Markup.
• 4,000+ data broker companies operate in the United States alone. Vermont's data broker registry, one of the few states that requires registration, lists over 500 — and Vermont acknowledges this captures only a fraction of the total.
• 300+ million Americans have profiles on at least one data broker site. For most adults, the number is far higher — your information likely appears on 50 to 100 or more broker databases.
• 1,500+ data points per person is the typical profile depth at major marketing data brokers like Acxiom, which has stated it maintains records on virtually every U.S. consumer.

Despite this scale, there is no comprehensive federal law governing data brokers. The Federal Trade Commission has called for legislation repeatedly since its landmark 2014 report, but no bill has passed. Regulation exists only at the state level, and even the strongest state laws (California's CCPA/CPRA, Vermont's data broker registry, Texas's data broker law) leave significant gaps.

Real Company Examples

The table below lists well-known data brokers across all three categories, what data they typically hold, and how their products are used.

How They Make Money

Data brokers use several revenue models, sometimes combining multiple approaches within a single company:

• Per-record sales: People-search sites charge $1 to $30 per report. At scale, even low-cost lookups generate significant revenue — Spokeo alone serves millions of searches per month.
• Subscription access: Many brokers offer monthly subscriptions ($20 to $50 per month) for unlimited lookups. BeenVerified and TruthFinder use this model heavily.
• API licensing: Enterprise clients — background check companies, identity verification services, and financial institutions — pay for bulk API access to broker databases. This is often the most lucrative revenue stream.
• Risk score products: Companies like LexisNexis and Verisk sell proprietary scores (fraud risk, insurance risk, tenant risk) derived from their data holdings. These scores influence real-world decisions about lending, pricing, and eligibility.

The economics are straightforward: the raw data costs brokers very little to acquire (public records are free; commercial data is cheap in bulk), but the packaged products command significant margins. Your data is the raw material, and you receive none of the revenue. Read more about data broker business models.

Why It Matters

Data brokers are not an abstract privacy concern. Their products enable specific, measurable harms to real people:

Spam calls and robocalls. Your phone number, listed on dozens of people-search sites, is harvested by telemarketers and scam operations. Americans received an estimated 50 billion robocalls in 2024, and broker-sourced phone lists are a primary enabler. Removing your number from data brokers is one of the most effective ways to reduce unwanted calls.

Stalking and harassment. People-search sites make it trivially easy to find someone's home address. Domestic violence organizations have documented cases where abusers used Spokeo, Whitepages, and similar sites to locate victims who had relocated for safety. A 2023 study by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative found that 60% of technology-facilitated abuse cases involved the abuser using a people-search site.

Phishing and social engineering. The more a scammer knows about you — your employer, your relatives' names, your past addresses — the more convincing their phishing attempt. Data broker profiles provide the raw material for highly targeted scams that reference specific details of your life to build false trust.

Price discrimination and access denial. Risk data brokers sell scores that influence your insurance premiums, loan terms, and rental applications. Unlike credit scores, these proprietary risk assessments have no standardized dispute process and limited transparency. You may be paying more for insurance or being denied housing based on data you have never seen and cannot correct. Learn more about the real-world dangers of data brokers.

What You Can Do

You have three main strategies for reducing your exposure to data brokers, and the most effective approach combines all three.

Manual opt-outs. Most people-search brokers offer a process to remove your profile. You visit each site, find your listing, and submit a removal request. The process varies: some sites require only an email address, others require identity verification, and a few require you to submit a photo of your ID. The major downside is scale — with 50 or more brokers listing your data, manual removal can take 10 to 20 hours of work, and you will need to repeat it every few months as your data reappears.

Automated removal services. Services like Delist.ai automate the process of scanning data broker sites, identifying your listings, and submitting opt-out requests on your behalf. They also monitor for re-listing and re-submit removals as needed. This is the most practical option for ongoing protection without spending hours on manual opt-outs every quarter.

Data minimization. Reduce the amount of new data flowing to brokers by limiting what you share online. Use a P.O. box or UPS Store address instead of your home address when possible. Avoid loyalty cards and store reward programs that sell purchase data. Review app permissions and revoke location access for apps that do not need it. Use email aliases for online signups. These steps won't remove existing data, but they slow the pipeline of new information feeding broker databases.

No single approach eliminates your data from every broker permanently. But combining active removal with data minimization can reduce your exposure from hundreds of listings to a manageable handful. Read our step-by-step removal guide.

Frequently Asked Questions