February 28, 2026
Data Brokers Are Selling Your Identity for Less Than a Pizza
The $250 billion data broker industry sells your home address, phone number, workplace, and daily routines to anyone with a credit card. No background check required. Here's how it works and why SOLD is the most personal series I'll ever write.
I want you to try something. Go to one of the major people-search sites. Type in your own name. See what comes up.
Your current address. Your previous addresses. Your phone number. Your relatives’ names. Your estimated income. Maybe your email. All of it sitting right there, free or close to it, for anyone who wants to look.
Now imagine you’re a domestic violence survivor who changed your name and moved across the country to stay alive. Imagine your abuser types in your old name and finds your new address in about thirty seconds.
That’s not hypothetical. That happens. Regularly.
The Numbers Are Staggering
The data broker industry generates roughly $250 billion a year. Companies like Acxiom, LexisNexis, Spokeo, and hundreds of smaller operations collect, package, and sell personal information about virtually every adult in the United States.
They pull from public records (court filings, property records, voter registration), commercial data (loyalty cards, purchase histories, app usage), and online activity (social media profiles, browsing data sold by apps you forgot you installed). Then they bundle it all together into profiles and sell them.
A single person’s detailed profile costs somewhere between $0.50 and $200, depending on how much detail you want. For $200 you can get someone’s full name, all known addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, known associates, estimated income, and in some cases their daily movement patterns pulled from location data sold by their phone apps.
There Is Basically No Regulation
Here’s the part that surprises most people. There’s no federal law in the United States that requires data brokers to get your permission before selling your information. None. Some states have started passing laws (California’s CCPA, Vermont’s data broker registry), but enforcement is thin and the industry moves faster than legislation.
Data brokers argue they only sell “publicly available” information. But they’re defining “publicly available” very generously. Your location data isn’t public just because a weather app sold it. Your purchase history isn’t public just because a grocery store loyalty program shared it.
The FTC has been sounding alarms about this for years. In 2014 they published a report called “Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability.” More than a decade later, the industry is bigger than ever.
Why I’m Writing SOLD
Every series I write interrogates a real system. For SOLD, it’s the data broker ecosystem. The premise is simple: a domestic violence advocate who built a completely new life discovers that a data broker sold her new identity to anyone willing to pay. Including the person she was running from.
The technology in SOLD isn’t speculative. Every tool, every database, every transaction described in the series is based on how this industry actually operates right now. I didn’t have to make anything up. I just had to describe what already exists and ask what happens to a real person caught in the middle of it.
If you want to see what’s out there about you, start with a search on Spokeo or BeenVerified. Then try to get your information removed. That process alone will tell you everything you need to know about who this system was built to serve.
Hint: it wasn’t you.