If you have ever searched your own name and seen your home address, phone number, age, and a list of relatives staring back at you on a "people search" site, you have already met the data broker industry. Roughly 500 companies in the United States alone make money buying, aggregating, and reselling personal information that was scraped from public records, purchased from advertisers, or scraped from social networks. Most of them will remove you on request — but only if you find the right opt-out form and submit it the right way.
The guides in this section are about taking back the parts of your digital footprint that you can. Some of this is one-time work (opting out of the biggest data brokers); some is ongoing (re-opting out every few months because brokers re-add you when fresh public-records data comes in). California now has a one-click opt-out called DROP that covers nearly every broker in one submission — every US resident should know it exists, and California residents should use it.
None of this is paranoia. Stalkerware, doxxing, identity theft, and SIM-swap attacks all start with the same step: collecting your personal data from places it should not have ended up. Reducing your exposure is the cheapest, highest-leverage security work you can do.
