I just found out anyone can buy my home address, phone number, and salary estimate for $2.99 and I feel sick

I Googled my own name in quotes last week. Third result was a people search site with a full dossier on me, Address, Phone number, Estimated income bracket, names of my relatives, A list of “known associates including a college roommate I haven’t talked to in nine years.

Nobody hacked anything. This is a legal Industry, there are roughly 4,000 data broker compain es in th eU.S and only four states even require them to register. The rest operate with zero oversight. They scrape public records. buy purchase histories from apps, and pull metadata from place you’d never expect including some state DMVs.

I spent an entire weekend submitting opt-out requests. Every site has a different process. Some take 48 hours. Some take 45 days. One asked me to mail a physical letter.

What really got me was realizing that anyone i.e an ex, a stranger, a stalker could have already pulled this file, for the price of a coffee, and theres no law stopping them.