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Julia had been dating her partner for about a month when the abusive phone calls began.
The partner had warned Julia when they got together that he had a stalker: a former girlfriend intent on sabotaging his life. But neither expected the woman to find the phone number for Julia’s family home and threaten her relatives with violence.
Soon Julia was being bombarded with emails, texts, and even a Venmo request with a note claiming to have "pornographic evidence" of her partner's infidelity. The woman walked past Julia's house, confronted her outside a McDonald’s, drove a nail into her car tire.
But how did the stalker know where to find Julia, who barely used social media? During a brief encounter, she got a worrying reply: "I found your info online."
That was how Julia, a white-collar worker in her thirties in the U.S. northeast, discovered the shadowy and barely-regulated industry of data brokers. When Julia searched her own name, and paid a small fee, she found her "whole life story": where she went to college, her past addresses, the names of her roommates and closest friends.
open image in gallery New York City's 35-story Helmsley Building where the headquarters of leading data broker LexisNexis is located ( Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images )
"It was shockingly personal, and made me feel incredibly vulnerable," Julia, who asked to be identified by an alias, told The Independent.
Even if you don't know data brokers — and most Americans don't, according to a recent survey — they almost certainly know you. These companies compile vast amounts of public and private information that they then sell on to customers.
Some of this data comes from public documents such as marriage certificates, drivers’ licenses and voter registrations. But bank records, loyalty cards, internet browsing histories, and even braking and acceleration logs
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