The data-broker industry is unusual in one respect. It is enormous, it is profitable, and almost nobody can name a single company in it. Acxiom holds dossiers on roughly 2.5 billion consumers. Spokeo claims a database covering more than 12 billion records. Neither has ever sold anything to a member of the public, and that is the point.

Brokers do not sell to you. They sell about you — to recruiters, debt collectors, insurance underwriters, political campaigns, landlords, private investigators, marketing agencies, and the occasional ex-spouse with a credit card. The product is a profile. You are the raw material.

The names worth knowing

Consumer-data brokers fall into two loose camps. The first is the people-search tier: companies that exist to turn a name plus a city into a phone number, an address history, a list of relatives, and a tidy aerial photograph of the house. In the United States this group includes Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages, MyLife, Intelius, TruthFinder, and Radaris. In the United Kingdom the equivalent is 192.com, with a long tail of smaller directories feeding off the open electoral register.

The second camp is the industrial tier: Acxiom, Experian Marketing Services, Epsilon, LiveRamp, Oracle Data Cloud, and the recruiter-favourite Pipl. These firms do not run a friendly search box. They sell bulk feeds and API access to enterprises, often under three-year contracts measured in seven figures. You will never visit their website. They already know who you are.

Where the data actually comes from

The popular assumption is that brokers steal it. Mostly, they do not. They buy it, scrape it, and assemble it from sources that are individually unremarkable and collectively devastating.

Four pipelines do most of the work:

  • Public records. Voter rolls (full register in the UK if you have not opted out, and freely available in dozens of US states), county property records, court filings, bankruptcy notices, marriage and divorce indices, Companies House director filings, and the UK Land Registry.
  • Commercial data partnerships. Loyalty schemes, retailer purchase histories, magazine subscription lists, charity donor files, and warranty registrations — sold or licensed downstream under terms most consumers tick through in five seconds.
  • Web scraping. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, Companies House officer pages, professional registers, and a long list of small forums and review sites. The legality is contested; the practice is constant.
  • Breach laundering. When 500 million records leak from a hotel chain or a credit bureau, the data does not vanish. It is cleaned, deduplicated, and quietly absorbed into the broker stack within months.
A broker rarely knows one shocking thing about you. It knows three hundred mundane things, and the combination is what sells.

Aggregation is the actual product

A single voter-roll entry is worthless. A single property record is worthless. A single Tesco Clubcard transaction is worthless. The trick — and the entire commercial moat of the industry — is in stitching them together against a stable identifier, usually a hashed email or a phone number, so that ten thousand boring data points become one detailed person.

The dossier that emerges is what gets sold. Acxiom advertises around 1,500 to 3,000 attributes per US adult, ranging from estimated household income to inferred political lean, religious affiliation, predicted health conditions, and whether the household contains a smoker, a hunter, or someone trying to lose weight. None of those attributes had to be confessed. Most were inferred from purchasing patterns and overlaid census data.

What it costs to buy you

Prices vary by tier, but the pattern is consistent across the industry.

  • Single lookups: $5 to £10 to pull one report on one person from a people-search site. Pay-as-you-go, no commitment.
  • Consumer subscriptions: $30 to $60 per month for unlimited lookups on BeenVerified, Spokeo, or TruthFinder. The market this serves is, officially, curious neighbours and amateur genealogists. Unofficially, it is also stalkers, debt-chasers, and small-claims plaintiffs.
  • Enterprise feeds: $500 per month at the low end for API access to a single specialist database; six- and seven-figure annual contracts for the major industrial brokers, sold to insurers, banks, ad networks, and recruitment platforms.

A US bank running underwriting checks may pay tens of millions a year to Acxiom or Experian. A landlord vetting a tenant may pay $19.95 to BeenVerified. The same record can serve both customers.

Opt-out, in theory and in practice

The legal right to be removed exists. Under California's CCPA, section 1798.105 grants residents the right to request deletion of their personal information from any business, including brokers, with a 45-day response window. Under the UK and EU GDPR, Article 17 — the right to erasure — does the same, with a one-month window extendable to three.

In practice the friction is engineered. Each broker maintains its own opt-out form, typically reached only after several clicks past a "we take your privacy seriously" splash. Most require government-ID verification per request. Some require a notarised letter. Several quietly reinstate records after 6 to 12 months, when fresh public data flows in and the system re-matches an opted-out profile against the new feed.

The result is a removal regime that is technically lawful and practically impossible at scale. A diligent individual working through the major US and UK brokers can expect to spend 40 to 60 hours on the initial pass, and roughly the same again every year to keep up.

The law gives you a right. The industry gives you a form per company, an ID upload per request, and the option to start again next year.

Why this matters in 2026

Two shifts have made the broker stack more consequential than it was a decade ago. Generative-AI agents now consume broker feeds at machine speed to enrich sales lists, score job applicants, and pre-qualify insurance customers. And the second-order market — brokers selling to other brokers — means that a record removed from one database is rarely removed from the next.

Doing the opt-out work yourself is still possible. It is also the closest thing in modern consumer life to a part-time administrative job. If you would rather not spend the weekends on it, Nox Æterna handles the full UK and US broker stack as a one-time service for £89, with periodic re-scans available separately. We take no subscription, we hold no account, and we send a PDF when the work is done.

Part two of this series looks at the legal mechanics in more detail — what CCPA, GDPR, and the newer state laws actually compel a broker to do, and where the loopholes still sit.