I apologize in advance of this is too basic a question for this community.

I just learned about lexisnexis and went to their website to request my report, opt out of everything I could, and request my information be deleted.

Are there any other companies like this I should be aware of so I can make the same requests there?

If it matters, I’m in California and it’s my understanding that I have a few more rights concerning this sort of thing than some others do.

  • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
    16·
    8 months ago

    You might start googling things like “OSINT handbook” or “OPSEC guide” and see what people put together to protect yourself from data-mining, fingerprinting, and various other ways to protect your personal information.

    Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the practice of using freely-available resources to collect information on something/somebody. Learning about the tools used to perform OSINT searches is a good first step to determine which databases you may want to scrub yourself from.

    Operations Security (OPSEC) is a military term that involves the security and protection of any data – classified or unclassified – that could potentially be used against you. OPSEC sounds exactly what you’re looking for, but I mention both terms because looking at potential attacks from both a red team (attacker) and blue team (defender) is a good practice to make sure you’re not missing any vulnerabilities (in other words, even if your only goal is defense, it is beneficial to think like an attacker and visualize how you would attack yourself).

    One such result of a search shows John Troony’s Opsec for the Paranoid gist.

    Some example of people-finder sites like LexisNexus from his document would be:

    ## People-Finder Sites

- 	BeenVerified: http://www.beenverified.com/
- 	DOBSearch: https://www.dobsearch.com/
- 	Intelius: http://www.intelius.com/
- 	LexisNexis: http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/public-records​.page
- 	Spokeo: http://www.spokeo.com/WhitePages: http://www.whitepages.com/
- 	WhitePages: http://www.whitepages.com/

    But the nearby sections in that document may be of use to you, like “Opt out of Data Mining”.

    OSINT/OPSEC is a giant rabbit hole you can go down, and you can get as paranoid as you want – scrubbing social media sites or poisoning the well of sites that collect data indiscriminately and don’t let you remove it, all the way to the ultra-paranoid burner phones and entire false identities (as long as you hopefully stay within the bounds of what is legal in your country or at least keep your laws in mind when you do step outside of the law). If you are interested in stuff like that, you might start looking at things like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity.

  • Dehydrated@lemmy.world
    12·
    8 months ago

    Yes, they are called data brokers and there are a lot of them, e.g. Acxiom, Kochava, Huq, X-Mode, SafeGraph and many more

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      8 months ago

      And there’s plenty of credit score bureaus outside the big three, and they collect similar information and may not be lumped in with data brokers like LexisNexus.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    9·
    8 months ago

    I guess you could have a look at the free scan with Mozilla Monitor? I’d be worried less about LN, and more about all the shadier sites scraping public records and blasting your info all over the place. LN costs a fortune to use, while all the zillions ofscrapers just hemorrhage your data all over the place. You ever googled yourself?

  • baritone_edge@lemmy.ml
    2·
    8 months ago

    This is what you’re looking for:

    https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List

    There is/was another website that had a large list but also all the opt out steps. I think they also had a service where they’d opt out for you, but you had to fill out a bunch of personal info.

    I also heard that a lot or most of the opt out services were bought by data brokers. There’s one site that seemed to just be 2 guys and a side hustle thing. I went ahead and did that. I have no proof that they did anything or did a good job, but I was still happy with the service.