What the data broker industry is doing with your personal information — new privacy laws, enforcement actions, breaches, and plain-language explainers, as well as online privacy tips.
Data Broker Profiles
PeopleSearchNow is a free US people-search site that shows a stranger your current street address, your phone numbers and a list of your relatives, with no account and no payment. Around that free record it sells advertising space to paid background-check brands.
MyLife.com is a people-search site that puts a "Reputation Score" and a red "Court Records Found" alert beside name listings, and it is the only site we track with a $21 million federal settlement behind that kind of alert.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
CocoFinder is a free people-search site that publishes names, ages, addresses, phone numbers and relatives on pages Google can index, and it makes its money by sending visitors on to paid background-check reports sold by other companies.
Filed under Data Broker ProfilesIf you searched "PeopleConnect phone number verification not my number" because the opt-out is offering to text a code to a number that isn't yours, the short answer is that the number is what PeopleConnect's file on you contains, not what your phone number actually is.
Filed under Data Removal
If you type radaris.com into a browser today you get a court notice, not a people-search site. On August 27, 2026, the Superior Court of New Jersey entered a final default judgment against Radaris.com, Rehold.com and Trustoria.com for violating Daniel's Law, and ordered the radaris.com domain handed to the plaintiff, Atlas Data Privacy Corporation.
Filed under Privacy Law
PeopleFinders.com is one of the oldest people-search sites still running, a paid background-report business with a free teaser layer that shows your name, age, past cities and relatives to anyone who searches. If you've just found yourself on it, this page explains what the site is and what a PeopleFinders search shows for free.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
USPhonebook.com is a free reverse-phone-lookup site: type in a number and it returns the name attached to it, the person's city and relatives, no account required. Most people find it the other way round, by searching their own name and discovering that their cell number is sitting on a public page.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
FastPeopleSearch.com is a free people-search site with no paywall and no account. A record page shows your street address and your phone numbers next to the names of your relatives. It is a real site rather than a scam, and its free opt-out starts with your email address rather than with your record.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
411.com is a people-search site owned and run by Whitepages, and the listing you found there is the same record that appears on whitepages.com under a different address bar. That single fact changes how you should think about it.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
FamilyTreeNow.com is a free people-search site built on genealogy-style data, which is why its records show your relatives and past addresses more plainly than most sites of its kind. People usually find it by searching "family tree now" after a relative mentions seeing the whole family listed on one page.
Filed under Data Broker ProfilesOn June 30, 2026, Governor Mikie Sherrill signed A.5328, now P.L.2026, c.25, and the New Jersey data broker law it creates does something most state broker laws don't. It bans the sale or licensing of ten categories of sensitive personal data outright, rather than requiring brokers to disclose the sale and let you opt out.
Filed under Privacy LawWhy is there no federal privacy law in the US? Two specific disputes, over who preempts whom and who gets to sue, have killed every serious bill, and the groups that benefit from the stalemate spend heavily to keep them unresolved. It is not for lack of bills, and Congress has passed sweeping technology statutes when it wanted to.
Filed under Online SafetyCalifornia's data broker fines are the ones everyone quotes, and most of the pages explaining them get the history wrong. Search for the SB 361 California data broker fine and you'll find vendor blogs saying SB 361 doubled the registration penalty from $100 to $200 a day and invented a second fine for ignored deletion requests.
Filed under Privacy LawOn January 1, 2026, three states switched on new comprehensive privacy laws at once: the Kentucky Consumer Data Protection Act (KCDPA), the Rhode Island Data Transparency and Privacy Protection Act (RIDTPPA) and the Indiana Consumer Data Protection Act (ICDPA).
Filed under Privacy LawGovernor Ned Lamont signed SB 4 on May 27, 2026, and the headlines made it sound like Connecticut had just got its own version of California's Delete Act. It didn't, not yet. The Connecticut data broker law, now Public Act 26-64, is real, it's broad, and it does eventually build a one-stop deletion mechanism modelled on California's DROP.
Filed under Privacy LawOn August 13, 2026, the California Privacy Protection Agency (which now calls itself CalPrivacy) fined Cybba, Inc. $52,400 for selling Californians' personal information without ever registering as a data broker.
Filed under Privacy LawThe California Delete Act DROP platform stopped being a paperwork exercise on August 1, 2026. That is the date every registered data broker had to start checking DROP (the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform, the thing most people type into a search box as "DROP California" or "CA DROP") at least once every 45 days and processing whatever was waiting in...
Filed under Privacy LawOn February 27, 2026, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Ranking Member of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, released a report on data brokers, scams and the losses that connect them. It puts a figure on that connection for the first time: identity theft flowing from just four data broker breaches has cost U.S. consumers more than $20 billion.
Filed under Privacy LawOn February 9, 2026, the FTC sent PADFAA data broker warning letters to 13 companies, reminding them of their obligations under the Protecting Americans' Data from Foreign Adversaries Act. The agency published a template of the letter and said nothing about who received one.
Filed under Privacy LawThe DentaQuest data breach is the largest health data breach reported to the federal government so far in 2026, and it was not a ransomware attack in the sense most people picture. Nothing was encrypted and no systems went down.
Filed under Data BreachesThe clearest FTC location data broker ruling on the books is the January 2025 order against Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel. It bans two companies from selling something almost nobody remembers agreeing to sell: a record of where their phone has been, precise enough to show a visit to a clinic, a church or a shelter.
Filed under Privacy LawThe Conduent data breach is the third-largest healthcare data breach ever posted to the federal government's breach portal, and it got there in stages. Attackers linked to the SafePay ransomware group were inside Conduent's network for 84 days before anyone noticed.
Filed under Data BreachesData brokers get your information from public records, from companies you already do business with, and from each other. Nobody hacked you. The profile a people-search site shows under your name (address history, phone numbers, relatives, "possible associates") was assembled legally from two supply lines: records any member of the public can pull from a...
Filed under Online SafetyOf all the identity theft statistics 2026 has produced, the one worth remembering is 229: the number of separate exposure records SpyCloud found circulating on criminal markets for the average breached consumer.
Filed under Data BreachesIDCrawl is a real, free people-search engine, and it is safe in the sense that it will not charge your card or install anything. The question that matters is whether it is safe to be on, and the answer is less comfortable: it stitches your public social profiles, usernames, photos, and phone and email listings into one page that anyone can open without an...
Filed under Reviews
Instant Checkmate is a legitimate company, not a scam. Which means you'll get a real report if you pay. But it is not a legal background check, its accuracy claims have twice drawn FTC action, and 11.9 million of its customers' own account details ended up leaked online in 2023.
Filed under Reviews
ThatsThem is a free people-search site that shows names, ages, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses with no paywall, and since at least 2025 it has been operated by Spokeo, Inc., the Pasadena company behind spokeo.com.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
FastBackgroundCheck is a free people-search site run by Mississippi Tornado Alley, LLC, a Sacramento company that operates nine other sites under other names, and it is the one broker in our library whose own emails tell some people their state doesn't entitle them to an opt-out. The site itself says almost nothing about any of that.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
CyberBackgroundChecks is a free people-search site operated by Mississippi Tornado Alley, LLC, the Sacramento company behind FastBackgroundCheck, FastPeopleSearch and seven other sites, and it carries an F from the Better Business Bureau for leaving 19 of 23 complaints unanswered.
Filed under Data Broker Profiles
A data breach is any incident where information that was supposed to be protected (passwords, Social Security numbers, medical records, payment cards) is accessed, copied, or exposed by someone who shouldn't have it. Most people picture an elite hacker breaking through defenses.
Filed under Identity TheftSpokeo is legitimate in the narrow sense but its profiles mix genuine records with stale addresses and other people's data, and the profile it built about you is visible to anyone who pays.
Filed under Reviews
The best ad blocker for Chrome used to be an easy answer: uBlock Origin. But that's no longer an option. Google's Manifest V3 transition removed the full version of uBlock Origin from Chrome, and there's no tweak that brings it back.
Filed under Web Browsers
Yes. Brave is safe, and out of the box it blocks more tracking than any other mainstream browser. That's the short answer, and it holds up under independent testing. The longer answer is why this question gets asked so much: Brave has a genuinely excellent privacy engine attached to a company with a habit of monetization stumbles (affiliate-link...
Filed under Web Browsers
Yes. DuckDuckGo is safe, and it is genuinely more private than Google. Its privacy policy is one sentence a normal person can read: "We don't save or share your search or browsing history when you search on DuckDuckGo or use our apps and extensions." That's a real, structural difference from Google, whose entire business is the profile it builds on you.
Filed under Web BrowsersSocial engineering relies on hacking people instead of software, and it has become quite the art. Rather than breaking through a firewall, attackers manipulate people by impersonating someone trustworthy, creating urgency, and exploiting fear and curiosity. This commonly leads to handing over passwords, money, or access.
Filed under Online SafetyPeopleConnect is a real US company (legitimate in the sense that it exists, operates legally, and will actually suppress your listing if you ask), and it is the single operation behind TruthFinder, Intelius, Instant Checkmate, US Search, and Classmates.com, majority-owned since 2015 by the private equity firm H.I.G. Capital.
Filed under Reviews
TruthFinder is a legitimate company, not a scam. But it is not the "real background check" its marketing implies, its reports are frequently wrong, and the FTC has already ordered it to stop overstating what it finds.
Filed under ReviewsDoxxing is the act of publishing someone's private, identifying information online without their consent (usually their home address, phone number, workplace, or family details) in order to harass, intimidate, or endanger them. The information is often technically public already.
Filed under Online SafetyIf you search your name and find your home address staring back at you, you are looking at the output of an entirely legal and (somewhat) regulated industry. Hundreds of companies collect public records, buy marketing data, and resell the combined profile. But what many people don't know is that most of them will remove you if you ask correctly.
Filed under Data RemovalNothing here matches that search.