Data Brokers & People-Search Sites

Data Brokers & People-Search Sites

How brokers and people-search sites collect, aggregate, and resell your information.

Aggregator

A company or site that pulls data from many separate sources — public records, marketing lists, other brokers — and merges it into a single profile per person. Most people-search sites are aggregators rather than original data sources.

Background Check

A report compiling someone's public and semi-public records — criminal history, addresses, court records, employment, and more — usually sold by a data broker or consumer reporting agency.

Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA)

A company that regularly assembles consumer information into reports used for credit, employment, tenant screening, or insurance decisions, and is therefore regulated under the FCRA.

Data Broker

A company that collects personal information about consumers — often without directly interacting with them — and sells or licenses it to other businesses, advertisers, or the public.

Data Scraping (Web Scraping)

Automatically extracting data from websites or public databases at scale — a common way people-search sites and brokers build their profiles.

Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)

A U.S. federal law that regulates how consumer reporting agencies collect, share, and allow correction of information used for credit, employment, tenant, or insurance decisions.

People Search Site

A website — Whitepages, Spokeo, BeenVerified, MyLife, and similar — that lets anyone search for a person's name, address, phone number, relatives, and other details, usually compiled from public records and broker data.

Permissible Purpose

Under the FCRA, a legally allowed reason — like an employment or credit decision — for pulling someone's consumer report. Without one, a CRA can't legally release the report.

Public Records

Government-held information that's legally open to the public, such as property deeds, court filings, voter registrations, and business licenses — a major raw-data source for brokers.

Reverse Phone/Address Lookup

A search that starts from a phone number or address and returns the associated person's identity and other details.

Skip Tracing

Investigative techniques — often using broker and public-record databases — to locate a person who has moved, is avoiding contact, or is otherwise hard to find.

Third-Party Data Sharing

When a company shares or sells personal data it collected to another company — how much broker data originates from everyday apps, loyalty programs, and websites.

Voter Registration Records

Public records of registered voters — name, address, and in some states party affiliation — that many brokers scrape as a core data source.

White Pages / Directory Listing

A publicly listed phone number and address associated with a name, historically from printed phone books, now aggregated online.