I apologize in advance of this is too basic a question for this community.

I just learned about lexisnexis and went to their website to request my report, opt out of everything I could, and request my information be deleted.

Are there any other companies like this I should be aware of so I can make the same requests there?

If it matters, I’m in California and it’s my understanding that I have a few more rights concerning this sort of thing than some others do.

  • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
    0·
    8 months ago

    You might start googling things like “OSINT handbook” or “OPSEC guide” and see what people put together to protect yourself from data-mining, fingerprinting, and various other ways to protect your personal information.

    Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the practice of using freely-available resources to collect information on something/somebody. Learning about the tools used to perform OSINT searches is a good first step to determine which databases you may want to scrub yourself from.

    Operations Security (OPSEC) is a military term that involves the security and protection of any data – classified or unclassified – that could potentially be used against you. OPSEC sounds exactly what you’re looking for, but I mention both terms because looking at potential attacks from both a red team (attacker) and blue team (defender) is a good practice to make sure you’re not missing any vulnerabilities (in other words, even if your only goal is defense, it is beneficial to think like an attacker and visualize how you would attack yourself).

    One such result of a search shows John Troony’s Opsec for the Paranoid gist.

    Some example of people-finder sites like LexisNexus from his document would be:

    ## People-Finder Sites

- 	BeenVerified: http://www.beenverified.com/
- 	DOBSearch: https://www.dobsearch.com/
- 	Intelius: http://www.intelius.com/
- 	LexisNexis: http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/public-records​.page
- 	Spokeo: http://www.spokeo.com/WhitePages: http://www.whitepages.com/
- 	WhitePages: http://www.whitepages.com/

    But the nearby sections in that document may be of use to you, like “Opt out of Data Mining”.

    OSINT/OPSEC is a giant rabbit hole you can go down, and you can get as paranoid as you want – scrubbing social media sites or poisoning the well of sites that collect data indiscriminately and don’t let you remove it, all the way to the ultra-paranoid burner phones and entire false identities (as long as you hopefully stay within the bounds of what is legal in your country or at least keep your laws in mind when you do step outside of the law). If you are interested in stuff like that, you might start looking at things like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity.