Eyes wide open: Today’s post was created in partnership with DeleteMe. What follows is my true economic analysis, but it’s important to know that DeleteMe is an industry player who profits when you buy its solution.
Imagine, for a second, that you recently moved. Maybe it was a few months ago, and you’ve only just had time to get all your paperwork updated. What happened to your personal information during that process?
Here are a few possibilities. The county recorded your deed or your new lease address, and that became public record. You changed your voter registration, and that’s also public. You set up internet and electricity. At the grocery store, you typed your phone number into the keypad to get a member price. You posted a photo of the new place, and your profile shows your full name. Maybe you set the location as your hometown.
It doesn’t feel like you’re publishing anything. It certainly doesn’t feel like you’re producing something. But you are. Your data is valuable, even though you generate it without meaning to. In economics, this is called a byproduct. A classic example is a lumber mill: they set out to make boards and end up with sawdust. Someone else turns that sawdust into particleboard. Your data is the sawdust of your own life.
Byproducts raise an interesting and awkward question. Who owns your records? No one set out to make them, so no one stopped to decide. When it comes to personal data, the answer has been, for a long time, that they’re owned by whoever picks them up.
This is where data brokers come in. You’ve probably heard of them before. They’re part of the data industry. They buy, license, or scrape records, then line them up by name and address so that they’ve got a ton of information about you.
What’s that data worth?
An individual point of data is worth almost nothing. Back in 2013, the Financial Times built a calculator using standard industry pricing. Basic facts like your age, gender, and location sold for about $0.0005 per person. Most people’s whole profile was worth less than a single dollar (we can assume a little inflation since then, but probably not enough to make your address worth even a full cent).
These pieces aren’t valuable on their own, though. They’re what economists call complements. This is the economics version of the phrase “more than the sum of its parts”: when you combine all that data, it becomes pretty valuable.
If you combine an address, a phone number, an age, and a list of relatives, you suddenly have a file. And a file is something that someone will pay for.
That’s why data brokers trade with each other to fill in what they’re missing. When the FTC looked at nine brokers back in 2014, seven were sharing data among themselves. One had about 3,000 data points on nearly every American. Another was adding 3 billion new records a month.
Information is what’s called “nonrival.” That’s the opposite of “rival”—meaning using it depletes it. Apples are rival goods. Once you eat one, your sister can’t then go back and eat it too. But with data, a broker can sell your file to three different buyers at very little additional cost. Every broker has a reason to list you everywhere they can for as long as they can.
Notice who’s missing from all these deals: you
The price of your data reflects what it’s worth to the buyer. It doesn’t reflect what it costs you. That could be a scammer knowing your mother’s maiden name, an ex finding your address, or, the most likely culprit: endless spam calls that make your phone nearly unusable. As an aside, isn’t it interesting that, over the past 15 years, cell phones have become so much better as computers and so much worse as phones?
Economists call this an externality. That’s a cost that lands on someone who isn’t part of the transaction (the classic example is pollution from a factory). When the people setting the price don’t have to deal with the cost, you end up with too much of the thing being sold. In this case, that means there’s too much of your life out for sale.
So let’s try to get it back
Search your name and your city. You’ll probably find yourself within a few results. Click through to that website and look for an opt-out link. This is usually in small print at the footer (or sometimes not there at all). Find your listing. You may find three of them, one for each address you’ve had, and each needs its own request. Paste in the URL and give them an email address, which they now have too. Then wait for the confirmation email and click the link.
That’s one site. The next site’s process is different. Some want to verify you by phone. Some ask for a photo of your ID, so to prove who you are, you hand over more personal data. Some take your request and say removal could take a few weeks. Others don’t confirm anything, so you have to come back later to check.
There are hundreds of these sites. Many are owned by the same few companies, or they buy from each other, so taking your listing off one doesn’t take it offline permanently.
Say you get through all of them. Search your name again in a few months and you’ll be back up there. Your deed is still public, you still swipe at the grocery store, and so on. The brokers are rebuilding your file.
DeleteMe estimates that the average person has 167 new pieces of personal info added to 23 new broker sites every year.
Try a back-of-the-envelope estimate. Say each removal takes 15 minutes once you count finding the listing, filling out the form and verifying. Multiply that by a few hundred sites, then repeat a few times a year. Then multiply it by what your time is worth to you. Economists call that the opportunity cost. For most people, the total is a lot more than they expected to spend on something they never signed up for.
DeleteMe does it for you
This is a classic case for specialization. The work is repetitive, and it gets easier with experience: knowing which site needs a phone call, which removals stick and which listings come back. Someone who does it every day will do it faster and better than you could. It’s the same reason you’d hire an accountant instead of learning the tax code.
That’s what DeleteMe does. It searches hundreds of data-broker and people-search sites for your information and files removal requests for you. Then it keeps checking, because the listings come back. You get reports on what it found and what was taken down. Wirecutter ranks it the #1 data-removal service.
I’ve been using DeleteMe myself, and the reports have been eye-opening. Seeing just how many places my information has ended up, and then watching those listings disappear, has made the economics feel more personal. It’s one more chore off my list, and given how often those listings pop back up, I’m happy to hand it off.
If you’d rather not make this your hobby, go to joindeleteme.com/Wolfers, and use the code WOLFERS for 20% off any consumer plan.