Your Personal Information Is for Sale: Here's the Price

Your personal information has a market price. Not a metaphorical one. An actual, quantifiable dollar amount that companies pay to access it. Let me tell you what the going rates are.

What your data sells for

A single person's contact info — name, phone, email, address — sells for anywhere from $0.005 to $0.50 per record when purchased in bulk. That is half a penny to fifty cents for everything a telemarketer needs to call you at dinner.

Premium profiles go for more. A full background check — your employment history, education, property records, court records, relatives — runs $2 to $10 on consumer-facing sites like BeenVerified or Spokeo. The wholesale rate is cheaper, obviously.

Specialized data commands higher prices. Health-related data (prescription habits, medical conditions) can sell for $0.26 per person. Financial data (credit scores, income estimates) goes for even more. The data brokerage industry is worth over $250 billion annually. Your data is a small slice of a very large pie.

Who is buying your data?

The buyers are more diverse than you might think:

Telemarketers and lead generators.They buy your phone number and call you about your car's extended warranty. This is the most visible (and annoying) use of your data. They purchase millions of records at a time, paying fractions of a cent per number. And it has gotten worse — now it is not just calls. It is texts claiming your USPS package could not be delivered, or that you have an unpaid toll that needs "immediate payment." The scams have evolved from annoying to convincing.

Advertisers and marketers. They buy your data to target you with ads. Not just online — direct mail, too. That stack of junk mail in your mailbox? Someone paid a data broker for your address.

Background check companies. Employers, landlords, and insurance companies buy data to screen you. Some of this is legitimate. Some of it is discriminatory. The line is blurry.

Scammers and bad actors. This is the scary one. Data brokers do not vet their customers very carefully. The same information that a "people search" site sells to a curious neighbor is available to stalkers, identity thieves, and social engineers.

Other data brokers. The data broker ecosystem is circular. Brokers buy from and sell to each other constantly, creating a web of databases where your information replicates and persists.

The math that should make you angry

Let me put this in perspective. Data brokers collectively hold data on virtually every American adult — roughly 250 million people. The industry generates over $250 billion per year.

That means the data industry makes about $1,000 per person per year from your information. You see none of that money. You did not consent to the sale. In most cases, you did not even know it was happening.

Meanwhile, it costs you. Robocalls waste your time. Spam clutters your inbox. Identity theft costs the average victim $1,400 and 200 hours to resolve. Your data is being monetized while you absorb the cost.

And that is just the money. The real cost is the interruptions — dinner, bedtime, a quiet moment — gone, because a telemarketer paid half a cent for the right to reach you.

Why it keeps happening

The data broker industry thrives on obscurity. Most people do not know these companies exist. They have never heard of Acxiom or LexisNexis or Intelius. They do not realize that the "free people search" site they used to find an old friend is the same industry that is selling their data to robocallers.

State privacy laws are catching up, slowly. But enforcement is weak, and brokers know that most people will never exercise their rights.

What you can do about it

You have two options:

Option one: manually opt out of every data broker site yourself. It takes hours, each broker has a different process, and you need to redo it every month because they re-list you. I wrote a complete opt-out guide if you want to go that route.

Option two: let Unlisted handle it. Free scan to see who has your data. $0.99 for one-time removal. $9.99 per year for ongoing protection. We scan, remove, and prove it worked with screenshots.

Your data is being sold whether you like it or not. The question is whether you are going to do something about it.