TODAY’S TECH ALERT
🚨 ALERT: You need to know this.
I send these alerts only when it’s truly important. This is one of those moments. Please read and share this with someone you know.
This alert is sponsored by Incogni. More on what Incogni can do for you right now below.*
Image: Gemini
You never signed up for them. Never agreed to their terms. Never even heard their names.
But right now, thousands of companies called data brokers have a file on you. Your name. Your address. Your phone number. Your estimated income. Where you go every single day, down to GPS coordinates. Your browsing history. Your health conditions. Which political party you lean toward. What car you drive.
They got it from your apps and loyalty cards, the websites you visit, public records. And they sell it to advertisers, insurers, background-check sites and political campaigns. Sometimes to scammers, who pay the best rates. Seriously.
The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee just confirmed what privacy experts have been saying for years. Breaches at four major data brokers cost American consumers more than $20 billion in identity theft losses. Not from hacking your bank. From hacking companies you didn’t even know had your data.
Argh.
💸 The part that should make you angry
The privacy law protecting you from your phone company selling your data was written in 1986. Data brokers didn’t exist yet. So they’re not covered. Any company barred from selling your data to the government can sell it to a data broker first. The broker sells it to whoever pays. Including federal agencies. No warrant required.
California passed a law requiring brokers to let residents opt out. Then investigators caught brokers hiding those opt-out pages from search engines using a code tag. On purpose. So you couldn’t find them.
And 33 California-registered data brokers recently disclosed they sold Americans’ data to foreign adversaries, including China, Russia and North Korea.
All legal.
🔒 What you can do
Here’s the problem with opting out manually. You do it once. Six months later, your data is back. Brokers re-add it constantly. It’s designed to wear you down, so you give up.
Incogni removes your personal information from hundreds of databases and keeps removing it every time it reappears. I’ve watched the removal requests it fires off on my behalf. The list is longer than you’d expect.
Here’s why it’s worth it:
It never stops. Incogni sends removal requests to 420+ data brokers and repeats the process every month because brokers keep putting your data back.
It works fast. Most people see their first removals within a week. Real results, not promises.
It’s cheap. 60% off for my readers right now. Less than $7 a month to make yourself a lot harder to find, track and target.
Remember, they can’t scam you if they can’t find you. They can’t spam you if they don’t know you exist.
Photo credit(s): Gemini