Search your own name online, and there is a good chance you will find a page listing your age, your current and past addresses, your phone number, and the names of your relatives. You never handed that information to the site showing it. A data broker did.​

Data brokers are the companies behind most of what a stranger can dig up about you online. This is a plain look at what they are, what they know, how they make money, and why almost all of it is legal in the United States.

What is a data broker?

A data broker is a company that collects personal information about you, combines it into a profile, and sells or licenses that profile to other businesses, marketers, and government agencies. In most cases, the broker has never met you and has no direct relationship with you.

You hand pieces of your data to companies all the time: a store loyalty program, a social network, a warranty card. Data brokers sit further down the chain. They buy, scrape, and stitch those pieces together from many places to build a profile they can sell again and again.

The business is big. The global data broker market was worth about $290 billion in 2025 and is growing roughly 7% a year, according to Maximize Market Research.

What do data brokers know about you?

More than you would probably guess. In a 2014 study of nine data brokers, the Federal Trade Commission found that one broker held 3,000 separate data segments for nearly every U.S. consumer.​

A profile can include your age, marital status, household income, estimated net worth, your home's value, your job, your education, and the names of your relatives and neighbors. Brokers also track what you buy and sort you into interest categories. The same FTC report documented categories like "expectant parent" and "diabetes interest," along with guesses about pregnancy, health conditions, religion, and politics.​

Where do data brokers get your data?

It comes from three main places: 

1. Public records like property files, court records, and voter registrations
2. Commercial data from companies you do business with
3. Online and mobile tracking such as cookies and advertising IDs

None of this comes from you directly. Any single source gives up only a few details, but brokers stitch them together into a detailed composite of your life, which the FTC notes is a big reason most people have no idea it is happening.

How do data brokers make money?

They sell access to the profiles they have built about you. That can be a one-time data sale, a licensing subscription, audience targeting for advertisers, or a lookup service for a business that wants to screen or verify someone. A people-search site might charge you a few dollars for a single report. The same data sells many times over, which is what makes it so profitable.

Is it legal for data brokers to sell your information?

In most cases, yes, and it has been for decades. The United States has no comprehensive federal privacy law that broadly restricts the collection and sale of personal data. A handful of narrower laws cover specific categories, such as credit and financial information, and anything outside those categories is largely unregulated. That gap is where the data broker industry lives.

What you can do about it

You have two realistic options.

1. You can opt out yourself. Find each broker that lists you, go through its opt-out process, verify your identity, and then repeat the whole thing every few months, because the listings come back as brokers re-scrape public records. It costs nothing but your time, and there are hundreds of sites to work through.
2. You can also use a removal service that does it continuously. That is what Papaya Privacy does. It scans 350+ data broker and people-search sites, files removals on your behalf, and keeps monitoring so your information stays down, with alerts when new exposures or dark-web breaches show up.

The goal with either path is the same. The less of your personal information sits on these sites, the harder you are to find, target, and scam.