Data Brokers: Who's Selling Your Information and How to Opt Out
What data brokers know about you, where they get it, and how to opt out — including California's new DROP tool that reaches every registered broker at once.
There's a whole industry you've probably never dealt with directly that knows your address, your phone number, your relatives and your buying habits. Data brokers collect information from public records, apps, websites and purchases, combine it into profiles, and sell it. Here's how it works and what you can do about it.
What data brokers know — and where they get it
Brokers build profiles from public records (property, court and voter records), from data that apps and websites share or sell, from loyalty programs and purchases, and from other brokers. The result can include your name, age, addresses, phone numbers, family members, estimated income and interests. Those profiles are sold for marketing, background checks and "people search" sites.
The scale is large. California requires data brokers to register with the state, and its registry lists more than 600 of them.
California's DROP: one request, every registered broker
Under California's Delete Act, the state launched the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP. Since August 1, 2026, California residents can use it to send a single deletion and opt-out request to all registered data brokers at once. Brokers are required to check DROP and have 90 days to delete a person's records after a request. You can find it at privacy.ca.gov/drop.
If you don't live in California
- Use your state's privacy rights. A growing number of states give residents the right to opt out of the sale of their data and to request deletion.
- Opt out of the biggest people-search sites directly; most have an opt-out page, though the process varies.
- Turn on a global privacy control in your browser where supported; in California, businesses must honor it as an opt-out of sale or sharing.
- Starve the pipeline. Fewer free apps, fewer loyalty programs and fewer "sign in with" buttons mean less data flowing to brokers in the first place.
The best opt-out is never opting in
Deleting yourself from brokers is worth doing, but it's cleanup. The bigger win is choosing services that don't feed the industry to begin with. Your most sensitive paperwork — tax returns, IDs, insurance and medical records — should live somewhere whose business model is your subscription, not your profile.
That's how Unfoggable works: we never sell your data, never share it for marketing and never train AI on it. Your documents are read only to file them for you.