Abine

It’s no surprise that purchases are tracked, which can legitimately provide relevant product or service suggestions based on your past purchases. But it’s not just helping the company you bought a product or service from online. Many websites, including retail outlets and others, will also sell your info to other advertisers, retailers, and data collection or retention entities. That can seem harmless enough—except that most people would probably prefer their history with websites not be shared when those sites involve an illness they suffer from, an addiction, adult purchases, personal debts, or anything else with a stigma attached to it. Even brick-and-mortar businesses participate in this information marketplace. They will often ask for your email address when you complete a purchase. This is exactly the kind of information that data brokers will pay for. Third-Party Tracking As uncomfortable as the thought of a website sharing your preferences, quirks, and b...

Even without the recent revelations about Facebook sharing user data, it would be hard for anyone who has spent time online to be unaware that information about us is being shared with entities that are using that info to make money. Just one creepily-specific targeted ad is generally enough to clue us in. What probably would come as a surprise is how incredibly personal the information about you being bought and sold is. If you don’t like the idea of your (most) private details being tracked, stored, quantified, and leveraged like some impersonal commodity with every use of a search engine, you’re not alone. And fortunately, finding out how to remove personal information from Google can be easier than you’d think. How Data Brokers Get Your Information Data brokering is a multi-billion-dollar industry—and the people involved want the public to know as little about as possible. They glean information in countless ways, employing algorithms that track, collect, coll...