Where do they get our information? From places like this!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/company-built-p ... -115515020.html
This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult

August 5, 2016
Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.
IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company’s database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from clients—it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. “We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom and dad,” he says.
Dubner declined to provide a demo of idiCORE or furnish the company’s report on me. But he says these personal profiles include all known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned; criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers—billions of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and time stamps to help PIs surveil people or bust alibis.
IDI also runs two coupon websites, allamericansavings.com and samplesandsavings.com, that collect purchasing and behavioral data. When I signed up for the latter, I was asked for my e-mail address, birthday, and home address, information that could easily link me with my idiCORE profile. The site also asked if I suffered from arthritis, asthma, diabetes, or depression, ostensibly to help tailor its discounts.
Users and industry analysts say the addition of purchasing and behavioral data to conventional data fusion outmatches rival systems in terms of capabilities—and creepiness. “The cloud never forgets, and imperfect pictures of you composed from your data profile are carefully filled in over time,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm. “We’re like bugs in amber, completely trapped in the web of our own data.”
When logging in to IDI and similar databases, a PI must select a permissible use for a search under U.S. privacy laws. The Federal Trade Commission oversees the industry, but PI companies are largely expected to police themselves, because a midsize outfit may run thousands of searches a month.
Dubner says most Americans have little to fear. As examples, he cites idiCORE uses such as locating a missing person and nabbing a fraud or terrorism suspect.
IDI, like much of the data-fusion industry, traces its lineage to Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler and self-taught programmer who began fusing sets of public data from state and federal governments in the early 1990s. After Sept. 11, law enforcement’s interest in commercial databases grew, and more money and data began raining down, says Julia Angwin, a reporter who wrote about the industry in her 2014 book, Dragnet Nation.
Asher died suddenly in 2013, leaving behind his company, the Last One (TLO), which credit bureau TransUnion bought in bankruptcy for $154 million. Asher’s disciples, including Dubner, left TLO and eventually teamed up with Michael Brauser, a former business partner of Asher’s, and billionaire health-care investor Phillip Frost. In May 2015, after a flurry of purchases and mergers, the group rebranded its database venture as IDI.
Besides pitching its databases to big-name PIs (Kroll, Control Risks), law firms, debt collectors, and government agencies, IDI says it’s also targeting consumer marketers. The 200-employee company had revenue of about $40 million in its most recent quarter and says 2,800 users signed up for idiCORE in the first month after its May release. It declined to provide more recent figures. The company’s data sets are growing, too. In December, Frost helped underwrite IDI’s $100 million acquisition of marketing profiler Fluent, which says it has 120 million profiles of U.S. consumers. In June, IDI bought ad platform Q Interactive for a reported $21 million in stock.
IDI may need Frost’s deep pockets for a while. The PI industry’s three favorite databases are owned by TransUnion and media giants Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. “There’s no shortage,” says Chuck McLaughlin, chairman of the board of the World Association of Detectives, which has about 1,000 members. “The longer you’re in business, the more data you have, the better results.” He uses TLO and Tracers Information Specialists.
Steve Rambam, a PI who hosts Nowhere to Hide on the Investigation Discovery channel, says marketing data remains a niche monitoring tool compared with social media, but its power can be unparalleled. “You may not know what you do on a regular basis, but I know,” Rambam says. “I know it’s Thursday, you haven’t eaten Chinese food in two weeks, and I know you’re due.”

—With Olga Kharif
The bottom line: IDI’s marketing databases may help PIs predict people’s moves or digitally peek into their cars or medicine cabinets.

And people rant about the GOVERNMENT pulling that kind of crap

George Orwell may have been right, and others may have used his book as an instruction manual.

Boca Raton.... why am I not surprised?

The problem with "marketing data" is that a lot of it could be wrong, mixed up with other peoples' data, people with similar names, etc., thus creating a "false profile". Yet there are no laws that require these "data collectors" to clear out the rubbish, and no laws that require them to notify the people they collect data on, what data they have.

That's why, when people pay cash for things that do not require them to reveal their identity - like Chinese takeout at the Chinese restaurant - these data collectors won't have that information. But order a pizza to be delivered to your house, your data just might end up in there databases.

This does not surprise me. Decades ago, I read about how data collectors gather information from magazine subscriptions, like Good Housekeeping, Popular Mechanics, etc.

And what about Internet use? Your ISP knows what websites you visit, unless you use a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Then the VPN knows what websites you visit ... or your family visits. All independently of what use the websites' make of your data.

If they are selling my data and making a profit from it shouldn't they be paying me a royalty?

We need feeds like this for our own education.  Most people are unaware that their info is being collected and how it is collected.  I entered a contest at our local grocery store and left my cell phone number (so they could contact me).  About a week later I started receiving scam calls on my cell phone.  I screen all calls, don't answer any calls unless they are on my safe caller list and block all unwanted numbers.  By doing this, I have reduced unwanted calls by about 80%.  The government cannot stop the unwanted calls.  Only us consumers can stop these calls.  It is beyond me why people answer the phone when the caller is unknown unless their business is telephone based.

Considering that those contests are always scams to begin with I have to wonder why you would divulge that mush information to them?  That is the number 1 place that they get info.  Right from the horse's mouth because people just give it out so freely.

One could always fill a bunch out with fake information. Practice active dis-information whenever possible.

Many years ago I had a co-worker who had the ability to annoy and antagonize everyone else in the work group.  Thanks to our emergency callback lists I knew his home address, home phone number and (of course) his desk number at work.  Anytime he managed to really get me ticked off, rather than smashing my fist into his face (as I wanted to do on many an occasion) I would stop by the local mall on the drive home and sign him up at as many of the sweepstakes and product information kiosks that I could find.  Since he was single, I knew that he was the only one that would have to deal with resulting phone calls and junk mail.  I knew it was working whenever I would hear him hang up his desk phone with a slam and then gripe loudly about getting calls from pushy salespeople (our jobs had nothing to do with purchasing, so there was no reason for salespeople to call.)

Orwell NEVER dreamed there'd be a time when people would pay a corporation to watch over 'em, 24/7. Once you sign your life away to "Life Alert" et al, I imagine you're a treasure trove to data miners. Gonna be a Brave New World, but it won't be any "government" doing the watching, enforcing and persecuting. Pity these idiots aren't useful against terrorists, as always, law enforcement works best against the law-abiding...

Makes ya wonder why the forces of Anonymous haven't crippled these corporations, anyone who's web-based like these jokers are doing an incredible balancing act - bet anything there's more than a bit of overlap between the Black Hats & data miners like these...

You mean use information from Hodges Directory ?   hee hee hee hee

The WWIV guys (the outlaw BBS software WWIV Net, folks on this blog have complained about me being too obtuse ;) used to send cops porno subscriptions, FBI would get their internal numbers put on gay chat sites and WWIV wardriving (driving around with radio scanners listening for idiots who thought cordless phones were secure) skills were second to none - probably the roots of Anonymous, come to think of it. In the early 90s the nascent WWW  was rife with all kinds of kiddie porn, bestiality porn, etc, (not as tame as today - heh) coupled together with a photo-printing service doing mailorder, and councilmen, LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers) as well as corporate heads were inundated with custom-printed disgusting porn of all sorts. Never mind mail-order sex toys for their embarrassment. Last I heard, a lot of those kids got arrested, etc - but I'd bet dollars to donuts (not much of a bet anymore ;) some found their way to companies like these. I heard the media was told to squelch such stories, the effectiveness of the WWIVNet bad boys was multiplied when every idiot tried the same thing from FIDO or using AOL...

White Pages: HORRIFYING! You go to look up a name and a phone number, and you are deluged with offers of special information beyond want you want. This information can get into everything from criminal records (you jay-walked in 1963 and did not pay your fine), to the identities of every person close to you who you have ever phoned in the last 10 years. Enough! All I want to do is check a name and a phone number! Now how to figure out which listing gets you to the basic information, and bypasses the junk? NOTE: If you want the special information, you have to pay for it up front, too! Well, back to the old phone book!