I’ve used personal data removal services for years. They cut back on the volume of spam calls and texts I receive. But I still get tons of scammy, spammy emails, along with endless catalogs and political mailers. That led me to wonder: How did my information end up in the hands of junk mailers and spammers?
To find out, I looked into the unsolicited mass-mailing industry. What I found may inspire you to change your habits to protect your digital footprint.
In short, the junk mail industry relies on lists from online data brokers such as Acxiom, Epix, Experian, and WhitePages. These companies buy your private information from charities and corporations, and even copy it from breach lists. Then, they sell the data to the highest bidder.
Sometimes, the data brokers don’t even have to pay for your data. Data brokers make money by selling data processing services. That means companies approach data brokers to request help organizing and cross-referencing customer data with public records, such as USPS change-of-address records. This helps them target specific people and households for advertising.
So, are you ready to find out what someone can find out about you? An actual foot is a good model for understanding your digital footprint.
The Heel: Your Basic Private (Public) Information
First, search for your name and home city using Google. You’re likely to find a few entries near the top of the search results that refer to you. Click one of the results. The profile likely includes all kinds of information you never willingly gave to that website, including your full name, age, physical location, email address, and known relatives. This is one part of your so-called “digital footprint.”
(Credit: Kim Key/Canva)
In the image above, basic personal information, which is the kind of public data you can find on a data broker website, is located in the pink blurb near the heel of the digital foot. I call it “basic,” but this dataset includes highly sensitive data such as your criminal history, tax information, Social Security number, physical address, and phone numbers.
The toes and arch of your digital footprint are made up of information you leak all the time, data you’ll never get back, and tidbits about yourself that you can keep to yourself. Let’s look at the other categories.
The Arch: Default Shared Data
“I could use your advertising ID and see where you have traveled, and see where you go, and basically infer a pattern of life,” said Michael Stokes, a former CIA agent and current senior vice president of strategic growth at Veilant. “That’s exactly what big data brokers do.”
I met with Stokes and Jonathan Aluise, a director of data solutions at Veilant. Veilant is an online privacy firm that primarily serves the US government. It’s also the company behind Privacy Protections, a personal data removal service that can remove your information from data broker websites.
Over a video call, the pair explained that all our computers and mobile devices have unique identifiers for advertising purposes. They then showed me how they could use these IDs to track people, namely myself and co-workers, around the world.
Using Claude and a weekend’s worth of programming time, Aluise built an app that could identify the device IDs in Ziff Davis’ New York City office and then trace the devices’ geographic locations over a period of three months. Aluise built the app using open-source, publicly accessible data, which includes unique advertising IDs.
(Credit: Jonathan Aluise)
If you’d like to stop being tracked, you can start by opting out of this feature on your device. By the way, I call it a “feature” rather than a nuisance because tracking lets you see ads relevant to you and your lifestyle. Keep in mind that turning off tracking means you will still see advertising, but it may not be as hyper-specific to you.
Apple allows you to periodically change your Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) by resetting your tracking choice. To stop advertisers from tracking you, navigate to Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking to toggle off tracking. On Android devices, you’ll want to reset your Google Advertising ID (GAID). To do so, open the Settings menu, tap Privacy, select Ads, and then choose to change or delete your advertising ID.
(Credit: Jonathan Aluise)
You also share a lot of data just by browsing online. Google categorizes your online activity into groupings called “cohorts,” which group internet users who browse the web similarly. Advertisers can buy ads that target a specific cohort without relying on tracking cookies.
If you’ve ever thought your phone was listening to your conversations because you received highly relevant ads after speaking out loud, chances are, you’re wrong. You got that ad because of your cohort.
“They don’t need the microphone,” noted Stokes. “They’re just using the cohorts that I belong to, looking at what cohorts they’re interested in, plus my search history, my browser history, all the things I’ve looked up. They’re making a real-time assessment that Mike wants a new pair of shoes, all without ever needing the microphone.”
The Sole: Info You’ll Never Get Back
I also spoke recently with Miguel Fornés Belcasem, who works with Incogni, another personal data removal service. He showed me an app he vibe-coded recently that gathers personal data from all around the web, including old, defunct accounts (say, a Myspace account), an old blog, forum posts, and old social media profiles. That’s right, even though the platform doesn’t exist anymore, or you can’t delete your account anymore, the data you gave away still exists online in some form.
“Humans remember a little bit of yesterday, and perhaps something three months ago if it was remarkable,” Belcasem told me. “That’s called episodic memory. Machines don’t work like that. They have full memory.
“As long as the resource is up and running and connected to the internet and responding to requests, we can get everything that has happened to you since you ever put a finger over a keyboard.”
The Toes: Data You Can Stop Sharing
Take heart, there are things you can do to keep some of your data to yourself. Jonathan and Mark noted that it’s possible to track a person using the app permissions on their devices, so combat that form of tracking first.
Before downloading new apps, find out what permissions it requires to function. You can do this by tapping the privacy tab in the App Store or Google Play Store entry for the app. If it seems like the app collects data from categories it shouldn’t (for example, a calculator app that needs access to your health data), then delete the app or don’t download it in the first place.
Recommended by Our Editors
Social media is designed to extract as much personal data from you as possible, while making it fun and addictive enough that you’ll keep giving away personal information for free. That means totally normal activities on those platforms are designed to expand your digital footprint. These include the following:
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Sharing photos and videos of yourself and other people on a public social media feed.
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Posting regularly about your daily habits.
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Tagging people you are close to in your posts.
Based on all this, advertisers, criminals, and snoops of all kinds can know what you’re up to every day, who you hang out with, where you live, where you work, and more. All of that data will eventually end up in data brokers’ hands, and you’re back to square one, drowning in junk mail.
Is Your Data Actually Valuable?
Your data’s value is like anything else under capitalism: If it’s for sale, the price depends on who wants it and what they’re using it for. That said, junk mailers are a different story. Junk mail will never stop filling your mailbox because your data is being sold for pennies.
(Credit: MailPro/PCMag)
According to MailPro, a physical mailing list supplier, junk mailers pay 3 cents to 15 cents per record for consumer data lists, which comes out to about $30 to $150 per 1,000 entries. Consumer data includes basic information like your full name, age, gender, and physical address. Premium data is a bit more expensive because it targets specific groups, such as people who have just moved to a new neighborhood, new parents, high-income households, or people with medical conditions.
If you’re looking for ways to completely erase your digital footprint and eliminate junk mail altogether, you have a tall mountain to climb, my friend.
As mentioned above, to make a serious dent, you will need to close every old online account you’ve ever created, even for platforms that no longer function (for example, Myspace or Friendster). You’ll also need to convince all of your friends, family, old co-workers, and classmates to remove all photos of you from their profiles and delete all mentions of you from their own digital footprint.
The best method for overall reduction is to give away less information going forward. Eventually, your old information will become obsolete as you move to a new home or when you get a new email address or phone number. Here are a few ways to put that plan into action:
Lie on contact forms. Don’t give away your personal information, such as name, phone number, or physical address, when signing up for newsletters or donating money to causes. Those companies and organizations sometimes sell or lose their contact lists, and that information ends up in the hands of data brokers who then sell it to junk mailers and spammers at a premium.
Use a fake email address. You can use Apple’s Hide My Email address feature in iCloud, or use a service like Proton Pass, which is a password manager that includes the ability to generate fake email addresses, so you can avoid spam in your inbox.
Use a personal data removal service. This is an effective way to try to claw back some of your basic personal information from data brokers. You can also appeal directly to these data brokers for free, but that process can be time-consuming, and the effects are usually temporary. A personal data removal service will monitor and repeatedly take down information about you when it gets leaked after a company’s servers get breached, making it a “set it and forget it” option.
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About Our Expert
Kim Key
Senior Writer, Security
Experience
I review privacy tools like hardware security keys, password managers, private messaging apps, and ad-blocking software. I also report on online scams and offer advice to families and individuals about staying safe on the internet. Before joining PCMag, I wrote about tech and video games for CNN, Fanbyte, Mashable, The New York Times, and TechRadar. I also worked at CNN International, where I did field producing and reporting on sports that are popular with worldwide audiences.
In addition to the categories below, I exclusively cover ad blockers, authenticator apps, hardware security keys, and private messaging apps.
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