Ep. 275: “What $9 Buys You from a Data Broker”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander.

Disclaimer: This transcript was auto-generated and may include minor errors.

Beau: I asked a friend of the pod to ask AI what it could infer from some data he bought about himself.

Chris: Okay. Oh my God. Oh, Beau

Beau: That’s Chris Parr. Chris the Producer. Genius of the I wonder what would happen if genre in citizen Big Tech “I’m not so sure it’s all good news” journalism–-this time, he’s taking a look at what data brokers know.

Chris: This actually is pretty shocking.

Beau: Chris had a big reaction, right? Well, that’s the reaction we all should be having to the dark and suspicious world of Big Data, and the companies that sell an infinite variety of data cocktails about you and me. So this week: Data brokers or bust.

Chris: We know that they are able to do this, but seeing it happen in real time is like pretty mind-blowing

Beau: So, for those of you who don’t know Chris Parr, you should. AKA Chris the producer, Chris is the YouTuber who brought us into the dark world of surveillance pricing a few episodes back. [clip from that episode] If you missed it, that’s Episode 266, called How Much Is Surveillance Pricing Costing You. I’m Beau Friedlander

Intro

Beau: Chris Parr, my favorite creator in the entire universe.

Chris: Hi. Back at ya.

Beau: Whatever. You are killing it, dude. You’re killing it. I just saw your new, well, ish video. It’s a couple weeks old now, I guess.

Chris: It’s new for me. It takes me a long time to do stuff, so it’s still fresh for me.

Beau: It’s fresh, all right. Fresh to the data broker industry. All right. So you did a new one and it’s called I Exposed What Big Tech Knows About You by Becoming a Data Broker

Chris: Yeah, I love the sigh there between.

Beau: it’s really

Chris: that’s how I wrote it. Yeah, for sure

Beau: the whole thing is with a big sigh, including with the bazooka loon [add sound from the video of the firing loon.]

Chris: Yeah. Loons are the bird, the Minnesota state bird, and they have red eyes. there was a thing where we were getting a new state flag, and there was a big movement for the state flag to have a loon with lasers coming out of its eyes. It didn’t win, but it’s our fan, Minnesota fan flag.

Beau: feels, very, very Minnesota to me.

Chris: Yeah.

Beau: This is YouTuber Chris the producer who’s been doing an incredible job following privacy and security and safety issues over the past I don’t know how long. We recently had him on the show to talk about surveillance pricing, and he’s back again to talk about his newest video. Okay, Chris. We’ve talked about surveillance pricing. That’s basically the fallout from what we’re talking about today, which is how our data is sold to make something like surveillance pricing a thing.

Chris: Three months ago I had zero interest in this, until I was like, Oh man, it’s the things that we’re interacting with online are actively changing our prices. I think that’s why the surveillance pricing video and topic is so popular because it’s concerning to everybody. So yeah, I just wanted to take it what’s that next layer deeper? Like, what is the data that is being used to serve you a price? Turns out it is extremely difficult to find that out.

The Start

Beau: I was shocked at the number that you flashed on the screen in the very beginning of your

Chris: Oh, yeah

Beau: the average person’s data over their lifetime is worth almost a million dollars. Well, $880,000-ish, right?

Chris: Yeah, isn’t that crazy? I mean, when I was going to school, in elementary school, I remember, they talk about it in facts class. I don’t know if you remember that, but to me, like if you could earn cumulatively a million dollars in your lifetime, that’s like a good, a good life, like a nice happy life, financially speaking at least. Turns out that’s how much the data that you provide these huge tech companies is worth, like almost. I think that’s more of a projection of what it will be when people like me get to be in our 90s. But still, I mean, that’s an incredible amount of money. In the first video we covered, you found that surveillance pricing could mean an annual savings or cost–most likely cost–of about $1200. So this 800,000 dollar data dossier number must be based on all kinds of money-making schemes….but we can’t just ask these Big Data operations to give us the dough they can make over the span of a lifetime… And we can’t see what sort of data they have. It’s not like we can buy data the way Big Tech can.

Beau: Well, Chris, I’m older than you, so you know, sadly, part of the reason we have the quagmire we’re in right now is because when I was going through school, we didn’t have the facts thing. We just had the opinions thing.

Chris: Yeah.

Beau: My opinion is algebra’s stupid and I don’t wanna know about it. And they’re like, “Okay, well, my opinion is you fail.” And that was kind of the end of it.

Chris: what it turned into is instead of it’s my opinion, it’s my fact.

Beau: Exactly. So we’re gonna go back to this 800 and whatever thousand dollar thing. You found in the first video that the way I became aware of you is this surveillance pricing video, which is, if you haven’t watched it, it’s phenomenal. But you said in that one that something like $1,200 was the up or down swing for a consumer over the course of a year.

Chris: I think on grocery prices, yeah. Like on specifically on grocery prices. And that’s not nothing that I uncovered. That’s like an investigation from Instacart.

Beau: Consumer Reports. Right?

Chris: Consumer Reports.

Beau: So let’s just take 1,200, back of the napkin here, right? And that’s a year, yeah? Let’s just see. That only gets us to $72,000 over a kind of normal amount of adult buying stuff. But here’s the thing, like, for someone who drinks beer or smokes cigarettes, like, it’s a lot more than that, right? So it is kind of like the kind of money you can just off-gas over a lifetime and not realize it in credit card charges or whatever. And I think consumers, if, you know… Yeah, it’s a huge amount of money, but we’re all doing it all the time because the businesses we do business with are good at squeezing us for a penny here, a penny there. Now, but here’s the deal is, like, there’s no way we can make money off of that, right? Like, I can’t call up a data broker and be like, “Hey, I understand my data’s worth about $800,000. Is there any way I could just get that $800,000 and I’ll wear a monitor?” Like, what do you want?

Chris: Yeah. No, I mean, no. I think the alternative makes me think of YouTube Premium. You know, you pay so you don’t get served ads. But they’re still collecting your data, so there’s no version of that.

Beau: You can pay, like, whatever. You can get services like DeleteMe where you can pay to have more privacy than you would otherwise.

Chris: Right, but you can’t get paid to give your data,

Beau: No, it’s not like an insurance policy where you’re like, “Ah, Mom and Pop, we need to sell this ’cause we wanna retire.” Nope, sorry, can’t do it. Now, so how did you start? You can’t just go and buy your data on the open market as a consumer, correct?

Chris: No. But you can request your data, and I actually have seen, like, probably on your podcast, some of your guests have done that and found super fascinating things about themselves or interesting things that data brokers think they know about them. So that seed might have been there because I listened to you, so thank you. That is a right that every American has. You can request your data from credit bureaus, but then I think there’s somewhere like 17 to 20 states in the US you can request your data from all data broker companies, and they’re obligated legally to give a full disclosure of everything that they know about you. And I live in Minnesota,

Beau: So you’re in one of the states where you can request?

Chris: yeah, in 2025, a law, the Minnesota, I don’t know what it is, MDGA or some weird acronym, law got passed where we do have the right to request our data and know what data broker companies are collecting about us

Beau: All right. So you did do that and I think as you say in the video, you are online a lot. You have a digital presence for real. And I think you’re kind of openly online. You’re not trying to hide what you’re doing, right?

Chris: No, yeah. I regrettably use Instagram. You know, like

Beau: And you don’t use a VPN or anything? You’re not using a VPN to hide where you’re going online?

Chris: occasionally, but not, no. Like up until a few months ago, never. But now, after having learned a bit about this, I have started implementing that, yes. But no, like my data exists. 100% it exists out there across all over the place. You know, I am constantly googling things. I’m binging YouTube. I’m using Instagram. I’m shopping on Facebook Marketplace. I’m messaging people on Facebook. I’m messaging people on iMessage. Where do you cut me off? Yes, I’m on the

Beau: Chris, can you take it easy?

Chris: But that’s not unusual, the things I just said. Like, everybody does that.

Beau: I wasn’t gonna cut you off. I am doing all that and some, and naked in klieg lights. I’m running around like a maniac online, and I do, and I use AI.

Chris: Link is in the description, by the way, for that content.

Beau: Listen, I also use AI sometimes, and I’ve noticed ’cause I intentionally left the settings wide open in the AI that I’m using ’cause I wanted to see what it was selling,

Chris: Hmm.

Beau: and boy howdy, are they selling stuff. Like instantaneous access to Google,

Chris: Wait, go on. What do you mean by that?

Beau: Go on. I shall. The best example, I do spend a lot of the time in the woods foraging for things that the forest can give me for free that I therefore don’t have to buy, and many of them are very good for your health. Prime among them mushrooms. I run into things all the time that I can’t identify. There are like three or four different kinds of Hericium that grow around here. Lion’s mane is the most famous one, but there’s other ones. They’re all edible, but I wanna know which one I have, and so sometimes I’ll use AI for that. Well, the minute I started doing it, I got so many videos about foraging on Meta, like the minute I did that. And then Amazon was like, “Hey, you wanna grow mushrooms at home?” No, I don’t. And then I went on like a shopping thing. I’m not kidding you. I went on Google Shopping looking for a vintage propane cooktop ’cause I saw one in an old French movie and I was like, “That’s kind of cool. Maybe I get one of those.” So I started to look for one. I got a freeze frame of the movie. I got a picture of it so I could see what the brand was, and I was doing a

Chris: Yeah. Oh, yeah, like a reverse image search kinda?

Beau: Yeah. Yes, so now the internet knows I was watching a movie by Francois

Chris: Oh,

Beau: Yeah, ’cause I’ve been wanting to learn French, so I’ve been watching French movies. And what else did it know? It knew that I wanted that cooktop. But the thing that was so interesting was it knew those things and it still tried to sell me mushrooms.

Chris: Yeah. That’s crazy. how fast it is from you searching in whatever AI LLM you’re using to then getting served the ad. I mean, it’s almost instantaneous. It’s crazy

Beau: It was, in that case, it was like literally in the same hour, if not the same 20 minutes.

Chris: that’s amazing.

Back to Brokers

Beau: All right, so you are like me, a person who leaves tracks in the woods.

Chris: Yes. Ah, nice. Hey.

Beau: Hey, ho, come back. So you went to these brokers. You must have been embarrassed by all the stuff they had on you Or at least like, whoa, they know a lot of stuff.

Chris: I did not get a single piece of information about myself from the five largest data broker companies in the world.

Beau: So I’m guessing that includes the credit bureaus and the tracker companies

Chris: From my memory, there is Experian, Equifax, Acxiom…

Beau: you went to CoreLogic,

Chris: Yes

Beau: and CoreLogic said nothing, as a matter of fact.

Chris: So they did not respond within the legally mandated 45 days, but since that video got posted, they actually did send me an email response like, “Hey, we have your data for you.” And this is even crazier. I follow the link, and it’s like an orange webpage, and there’s nothing there. So I keep refreshing the page, nothing. I tried in incognito mode. I don’t know what that does, but doesn’t work. And then I start to realize that when you move your mouse over the webpage, you know when it changes from the cursor to the hand or you can click on something?

Beau: There were links hidden

Chris: There was information on the page, but I couldn’t see what it was. I didn’t really dig any further than that, but I’m like, This is crazy, the lengths that these companies are going to not give me the information that I’m requesting. I was baffled at that. I wish I could include that in the video, but it’s good for your podcast, I guess.

Beau: Well, I mean, those are dark patterns, I think. A dark pattern is generally is just the thing that you need on a website that will get you to force that website to stop doing whatever it’s doing that you don’t want it to do. Hard to find. They make it hard to find on purpose. Let me ask you a question, though. Were you on Chrome? Were you using Chrome when you did that? Firefox? What were you using?

Chris: I use Chrome and Safari

Beau: And did you try it on both Chrome and Safari to see if you could get it to cough up its knowledge?

Chris: Yes.

Beau: And it didn’t do it

Chris: No, it was the same on both

Beau: That’s creepy, CoreLogic. You should do better. How about Acxiom spelled so stupidly I can’t even begin to say? You know what? If you’re at Acxiom and you’re hearing this, I don’t want your dumb job. Okay, so A-C-X-I-O-M is another broker. Also, I don’t think I’m allowed to say they’re evil, but whatever. They are in the data broker business, which is synonymous with evil.

Chris: just say they’re evil, I think at that point.

Beau: You can say it. I’m here. I have to be restrained and adult

Chris: they’re evil. I don’t know if they’re evil ’cause I don’t know what they know about us, so

Beau: I also don’t think we’re in metaphysical territory here. Now Axiom said, “We have confirmed that we do not currently maintain…” Listen to this language. “We do not currently maintain any information about you or the person you represent.” Now, I don’t know. I know enough about law where currently could mean at this particular moment, ’cause we took it off while we wrote this message to you. Maintain could mean that we’re not taking good care of it, but it’s here.

Chris: Yeah, good point, I guess. I don’t know. I love being able to talk to you about this because I never would’ve thought of… I’m just a simple man. I was like, What the hell? They don’t have any information about me?

Beau: I wonder if they don’t, though. That language seems slippery to me. That was the next one, now Epsilon… Oh, they don’t do M. They do it correctly, It’s a real word this time. Epsilon Data Management LLC, They don’t have any personal data on you. So their tens of millions of dollars is not banking on your $880 thousand dollars worth

Chris: it’s an Epsilon. Yeah. By the way, worth tens of billions of dollars, the company is. Apparently not.

Beau: I don’t buy it, so to speak

Chris: yeah, I am just continuing to be baffled going through this process, getting these responses. I’m just like, how can they even have a leg to stand on with that statement? Like that is insane. from a different one I did, yeah. But it was like, “We know your address and stuff,” but it was all redacted. So I couldn’t even verify if it was correct or not. That was from not one of the top five. That was from a different one. Let me be clear. From the top five largest data brokers in the world, I did not get any information about myself in response, no

Beau: Well, that’s interesting. So how are they making so much money if they don’t have any data?

Chris: That’s a great question, Beau. Man, that’s the question

What Next / Equifax

Beau: So they do have data. Okay, let’s take them at their word. What did you do next, taking them at their word or not taking them at their word?

Chris: I called. Equifax responded and they were like, “We do have your data. Here’s the link.” And I followed the link and it asked… Here’s what’s interesting. It asked me to verify my identity. If you’ve gone through these things, like the DMV, they’ll serve you which one of these addresses have you previously lived at? And this is deep data, by the way. When I’m filling this information out, this is a residence that I lived at five places ago, an apartment that I rented in Los Angeles. I haven’t lived in Los Angeles for six years now. So this is six years ago. This is just one of the verification questions. It’s like asking me my siblings’ names. So obviously they have information about me

Beau: They know where you live and they know who you’re related to.

Chris: Yeah. Even more than that. There’s 10 questions you have to fill out, and I know this because I did it close to 100 times trying to follow this link. Because what ended up happening is I would just get an error message, and it would tell me to contact customer service. Then I called customer service, and it was the most insane three-hour phone call I have ever had in my life.

Beau: Do you think it was intentional that there was a sticky site that didn’t work right, or that they wanted to make it so difficult that you’d get on the

Chris: I have no idea. I have no idea. I think you’re right about that dark pattern thing. Is that like not being able to unsubscribe from something?

Beau: Yes. It is with unsubscribe, yeah

Chris: I think that’s kind of a similar thing here. So I’m like, “Okay, I will do what you tell me to then. I’ll call you, and I will talk. I’ll go through this process.” Fortunately, I felt like a little bit like I was wasting my time, but I’m filming it. I’m making a video about this. I don’t think most people have the luxury of doing that though,

Beau: how long did it take you to get a human being on the phone when you called this place?

Chris: Actually it was pretty quick. It was pretty quick.

Beau: And was it the human being you needed to talk to?

Chris: Maybe. But they didn’t think so. I got passed to probably eight or nine, 10, 11 different customer service people. I was just moving up the chain. Basically they gave me so many different reasons why I couldn’t access my data. You mentioned VPN. I turned my VPN off obviously. They mentioned that my name was spelled wrong. In the video I made, I flipped the Rs. Actually my full name is Christian, and they had my name spelled T-A-I-N at the end, not T-I-A-N. I don’t know. They know my residence from six years ago, but have my name spelled wrong. I don’t know if that’s true

Beau: and they don’t have a predictive thing where they can see, like, that’s probably a typo?

Chris: Yeah. Also, nobody’s named… Is anybody named Chris Tane?

Beau: Christine. I’m sure it’s happened, but the transposition of the two Rs at the end of your name were, the wrong R. It sounds like you were escalating, like, “You can’t help me. Can you put me in touch with someone who can?”

Chris: Visual comedy gold. yeah. Hey man, whoa. They were escalating. I was just following instructions.

Beau: So what were the instructions? How was the escalation happening?

Chris: They were trying to get me off the phone, pretty aggressively. But I’m fighting this battle until the point where I need to cite the law which also have never done on the phone before.

Beau: So you’re literally saying my state says that I have the right to see this?

Chris: Yes. Fortunately I was able to pull up on Google quickly when the Minnesota law was passed and I could cite word for word what it says to the customer service person. To their credit, they’re just following company policy which probably hasn’t been updated. Maybe nobody’s pushed them on this in the state of Minnesota specifically. That’s kinda my hunch. But that was over a year ago that the law got passed. Kinda baffling to me that their company policy… Actually, you know what’s even crazier is their own company policy says that all consumers are entitled to a full disclosure once every 12 months. So not only were they breaking Minnesota law, in my opinion, allegedly, I’m not a lawyer. Not only were they maybe breaking Minnesota law, but they were breaking their own policy that they have on their website. So yeah, I was reciting both of those things to them. And customer service agents are, I assume, just trained to at that point just deflect so they say, “Well, our policy is it’s not allowed in your state.” Repeated that probably 50 times to me

Beau: The flowchart must be pretty funny, calls, flowchart, no. Flowchart, guy calls, says hi, no.” but the interesting thing is two things. I am a firm believer in the idea that your spiritual Wellbeing or state is expressed almost… I’m just gonna say this again, ’cause there’s a way that I think about this, which is, it’s funny. It’s kind of important. All right, so I actually believe that your spiritual wellbeing is measured really accurately by how you treat customer service representatives. where like… Yes. Well, waiter’s different ’cause they can spit in your soup. But where your behavior, good or bad, is not gonna affect the outcome very much, that’s where just being a good person, and knowing that they didn’t make up the rules. They’re just working there. You know, they’re not Darth Vader. They are just people on the Death Star who happen to have jobs at the Death Star. so okay, so in the Death Star, there was a lot of resistance, and it seemed like it was somewhat calculated. But, you did get some of your data and we’re gonna talk about that when we come back from the break.

Chris: Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. Yeah, I’d love to see that Oh, sure. Yeah, waiters and waitresses, for sure Okay, yeah. Yeah. Yeah

C Break

Beau: Chris, so I understand, I’ve tried to get my data from a few places and it has not always worked out for me because you can’t buy all the kinds of data that are out there unless you’re in the business of doing something with it. Did you run into that problem? But even when you argued, even when you were like, “This is the law and you have to give it to me”?

Chris: No. I was met with constant no and no, it’s not available in your state. I’d be curious if you requested it from California because California, just as is in the media, the new data privacy law, that wasn’t really in national news or any news in Minnesota. So I don’t know. But no, I never got access to my

Beau: Yeah, the drop law. Yeah. So even when you said, “It’s the law in my state that you have to share this with me. I’m in Minnesota. I am Christian Parr or Christine Parr, and I want my data,” they said no?

Chris: Correct. Yeah. I didn’t wanna give up, so ultimately we got to a point where they were like, “We reset everything in our system. The link will work. Give it one hour.” This was on Friday at 5:00 PM.

Beau: And which company is this?

Chris: This is Equifax.

Beau: Okay

Chris: So this is Friday at 5:00 PM, so I didn’t give it one hour. I gave it the entire weekend. Monday morning, came in here, first thing, pulled up the email, tried the link. Guess what happened?

Beau: You didn’t get anything?

Chris: No. Same exact error message. So I called again and was kinda met with the same thing. And at this point I’m just kinda going crazy, so yeah, they did wear me down to a point where I’m like, “I need to try something else.”

Frank Reynolds LLC

Beau: When you were making your video about surveillance pricing, you created a new person to test your suspicions. Genius that you are, you set up an LLC called Frank Reynolds, which is a person’s name and also Danny DeVito’s character on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. You hired the comedian Comrade Tripp, to pretend to be Frank Reynolds and use the credit card you took out for the company in the name of Frank Reynolds. The surveillance pricing companies thought Frank Reynolds was a person, not a company. You still have the LLC.

Chris: Yes. I could not, for the life of me, after days of trying, get access to my data even though it’s required by law as a person. So I took more extreme steps. My goal was to appear as though I was a data broker. The best way to appear as though you’re a data broker is literally just be one. So I turned my Wyoming LLC, Frank Reynolds LLC, and made it do business as Reynolds Analytics. My brother made a beautiful website, reynoldsanalytics.com. Check it out. It’s pretty great. On the front, on the header, it says…

Beau: reach, resolution, relevance? Reynolds. Full stop. “Reynolds Analytics moves fragmented consumer data forward into persistent identities. We resolve, enrich, and activate data so the world’s leading brands can reach real people at relevant moments and sock it to them.” No, you didn’t say that. Request demo. He did a really good job. I feel like he did use AI somewhere in here because deterministic and probabilistic. Matching across email, phone, post. Geez

Chris: Yeah. I’m glad you’re digging into this because my brother spent some time building this. And I just blew by this part in the video so fast, The whole thing is vibe coded. If you go to the About page, it’s pretty funny if you know this. The prompt that he used was like, “Start writing an About page for an analytics company, but make it progressively more confusing and complicated.” If you read the sentence, it just gets outrageous

Beau: What’s fun here is the first paragraph looks like English maybe, and then the next paragraph looks like a mixture of English and code. And then there’s numbers and there’s lots of things that are all caps and then, yeah… Anyway, so the last sentence though is, “Data should serve people.” Now, it should. It doesn’t. Now let’s get into who bought this? Who among these people who were not giving you information decided, “Okay, this is legit. We’ll give him information.”

Chris: well, I got an email with the domain and that was kinda everything. That was more than enough to start utilizing dashboards on other smaller data broker companies. The biggest problem that I was met with was generally speaking, and I think this is how the industry works, and I don’t actually know this for sure but this is what I think. You would probably know this. I was met with a minimum bulk order of $10,000 minimum. I am not prepared to spend that much money. So that was just not an option. There’s an AWS data broker marketplace where you can buy big bulk data sets. That wasn’t even an option for

Beau: So Amazon sells big data sets. How big?

Chris: I mean, I don’t know. The minimum order was $10,000

Beau: $10,000. And it’s not like Best Buy where you can buy it, shoot the movie, and bring the camera back and get your money back.

Chris: No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe. That would be interesting. $10,000 on the line to experience that.

Beau: So you were priced out of some of what may have been more granular data, it sounds like you did get access to some

Chris: Yeah. There are smaller data broker dashboards, marketplaces that you can sort data not by name, but by… You can input information that you could probably find publicly. I think most people know I live in Minneapolis, that’s in Hennepin County. Click that or fill that out. I’m looking for data of everybody in Hennepin County. That is over a million people. Well, I’m gonna add another, what’s it called? Input, to sort through this data. I want this person’s data, or I want all of the people that are in Hennepin County that are born between 1992 and 1994. You could probably find out my birthday somewhere. I was kinda going generally on what information would most people know about me. That brought it down to, I don’t know, less than 50,000. I’m married. Click marital status, married. What else did I fill out in there? I went through the process of putting these inputs in that most people would know about me until I got the number down to one person, and I purchased that from one site for five cents.

Beau: Mm-hmm. Five cents.

Chris: But if you were to order, let’s do some math actually

Beau: Yeah. Okay. I’ll sit here while you do math because I’m not numerate

Chris: If you were to order all the data in Hennepin County, that’s a substantial amount of money. That’s $50,000 for a million user’s data just from this one marketplace.

Beau: So what else?

Chris: Then I used that information to– I was able to get the emails that I use, and I could use that information on other data broker marketplaces, and compiled a file of as much data as I could find. I mean, I probably spent a day doing this. And then I did what I think other data broker companies do. I used AI to organize this data and put it in something that I could understand, which is a JSON file. Is that how you say

Beau: Aha

Chris: Yeah. So I got that as my final output, and it was insanely long. I mean, it was a small file, but I could scroll for an hour on it. Just so much information

Beau: And this is a five-cent file or is this

Chris: This is a combination of, I think I spent $9 total

Beau: So you have $9 and you have endless scrolling for $9. That’s fun. That’s kind of worth the money.

Chris: Yeah, it was kind of fun to look at… I went through the whole thing. It was kind of interesting just to see what information data brokers have been collecting. It’s not really that though, ’cause I wasn’t able to get the raw files. That’s what I really wanted, was where’s my cellphone pinging? Like, how often is that pinging? I wasn’t able to get that

Beau: Like what tower is it pinging

Chris: Yeah, or what exact Google search did I make at this point in this day? I was not able to get even close to that granular.

Beau: because you were at a smaller company where you couldn’t spend the 10 grand or?

Chris: Maybe. I don’t know. I spent one day doing this. I have no idea what I’m doing

Beau: Right. All right, so you could not get… That’s interesting, ’cause that is what I would wanna know too,

Chris: Right. Yeah.

The Data

Beau: Do they know where I am? Where do they think I am? What do they think I’m doing online? What were you able to figure out from it?

Chris: I was able… And maybe you know more about how JSON files… but they put the data in buckets. Like, interested in vehicles, and then it has an arrow to this model of vehicles. They think I’m interested in Toyota Matrix, which is the car that I drive. They know that I drive a Toyota Matrix. That’s not something that everybody would know about me. Toyota Matrixes, by the way, are just one of the best vehicles that are no longer available.

Beau: So it knew that you had a Toyota,

Chris: it knew that,

Beau: do you wanna go through the things that just pop? Yeah, I do. I do.

Chris: Yeah, so I’m looking at it right now. I just pulled it up. It has things like I’m interested in role play and fantasy. Now, I’m not actually interested…

Beau: That could mean a lot of things.

Chris: I don’t do LARPing or furry or whatever. But what is out there about me is I made a documentary about the largest role-playing festival in the world a few years ago. This is a great event in Pennsylvania. And I did a ton of research. So all of my Google searches and all of that research is getting collected somewhere and compiled to spit out this one line. There are thousands of lines on here. I’ll keep going. Member of a frequent flyer program.

Beau: Fine.

Chris: That’s most people

Beau: Basic. Not most people, but most people who are producing stuff

Chris: Yeah, true.

Beau: Were you surprised? Did you find more or less what you thought you would find? Or did you just find that you wanted more, like this whetted your appetite, but there’s more that you

Chris: Oh yeah, sure. For sure I’d love to get more. But at that point, why? I guess what I realized was it’s incredible the things that data broker companies are able to find out about me. For example, they think I’m interested in eating at Chili’s. I don’t know if you know what Chili’s is.

Beau: I do. Are you?

Chris: Yeah. It’s fine. I used to eat there as a kid, but why I think that they know that is because I made a comment on a YouTube video a year ago, and I remember this, making a joke that my family eats at Chili’s. So that is buried somewhere online. Somebody dug that up, put it in a container, said that I’m interested in Chili’s, and sold it to me.

Beau: The data Chris bought was hard to parse because there was just so much of it, so I asked him to drop it into an AI large language model and ask it a simple question. How would you market to this person? What are the top five things that you would try to sell them?

Chris: Okay. Oh my God. Oh, Beau

Beau: Is it selling you furry costumes?

Chris: This actually is pretty shocking. Okay. Number one, it gave me the five things that it would market to me. Number one is a hybrid three-row family vehicle. Why that doesn’t mean anything to you?

Beau: It does. I already can tell. I can infer why.

Chris: Nice.

Beau: pregnant or you have children and it’s time

Chris: Okay, so I am expecting a baby in December, but not only that, I purchased a Kia Carnival with my wife two weeks ago. That is a three-row vehicle. Yeah.

Beau: Okay. Number one. I love the creepy. Let’s keep going

Chris: That is wild. Oh my God.

Beau: How does that make you feel when you see that? You had a huge reaction

Chris: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s exciting that it knows that, but also then the disturbing feelings come. We kind of already know this, but seeing it play out, here’s what it is. We know that they are able to do this, but seeing it happen in real time is pretty mind-blowing

Beau: No, it’s like catching Santa Claus coming out of

Chris: Yeah, sure.

Beau: tell me what the second one is

Chris: Second one is home improvement and remodeling. That could be applied to a lot of homeowners though. But yeah, that’s accurate. Number three is creator and prosumer tech. This person is tagged as an early adopter who wants the latest tech regardless of price. Come on.

Beau: Except when it comes to datasets.

Chris: right. Yeah. It says I’d sell cameras, editing software, storage, and monitors. All true. I am a video producer. I primarily edit, and I actually am looking at getting a– I only have one monitor right now. I’m looking at getting a second monitor, so, yeah, it’s pretty crazy.

Beau: Is there anything else you wanna hear? Like, you’re like, “I’m not gonna tell you the fourth one because that has to do with what I do in my spare time.”

Chris: You know what’s interesting? I was kind of interested to see if there was any information in

Beau: The concern is everyone looks something up that… Not everyone. Probably not my friend Craig, and he listens to the show. Hi, Craig. no, he’s an amazing man. But for the rest of us, we’re not saints. So does that stuff pop up or no?

Chris: No. I wasn’t able to get that information.

Beau: Well, of course,

Chris: I’m just not good

Beau: ’cause there’s no information about you in that regard, but other people might be. So are the other ones surprising or are they just kinda going down the

Chris: Travel and live events. That’s pretty… It does say NFL and NHL game attendance. I’ve never been to an NFL game in my life, and I really don’t have any interest in it, but I am a super big Minnesota Wild hockey fan, so that one definitely checks the box.

What it gets wrong

Chris: But that’s where the many times this data set was just wildly wrong. It said that I was interested in purchasing a Lamborghini and a Porsche and maybe it’s because I Google searched just to see what fancy cool cars look like. But it also said that my net worth is $1 to $2 million. Not accurate at all. Couldn’t be more inaccurate. But then it also said my net worth is 1 to $50. That one’s a little closer.

Beau: Why did it say both? Yeah, why did that happen?

Chris: I have no idea. The stakes that I laid out in the video were like, the credit bureau companies do consumer data collection as well. My whole goal was to see if my data was correct in their system. If your data is incorrect, that’s providing the credit score that you get served, that could impact if you get a loan. That could impact

Beau: How much you pay for that loan?

Chris: your loan is. I’ve gone through the home buying process and a 1% change in an interest rate is like tens of thousands of dollars, over $100,000 over the

Beau: bedroom. It’s a bedroom. Or a bedroom

Chris: Yep, sure. That’s a good way of putting it. And while I’m unclear if the data that I was able to find contributes to giving you a credit score, the fact is the data that I was able to collect on myself, a lot of it was wrong. And this is what’s interesting to me. After I published the video, a lot of the commentary was like, “Oh wow, that’s crazy, what they know about us.” But on the flip side, some people were like, “Good, I’m glad that the information is not accurate.” That’s actually comforting to know that some of the stuff that they know about us is just not correct, and I didn’t foresee that being a takeaway at all.

Beau: I happen to belong to that camp. And so one of the things that I have done for years is when I sign up for something and they want my date of birth, I always put in April 1st, 1916. For a long time it was 1916. I think I’ve aged out of that one, and I have to start

Chris: Yeah, That’s pretty funny. That’s pretty great. little weasel just like me.

Beau: 100%. Weasels are flexible and agile, and that’s me too. I am fond of lying to any commerce site about me as much as possible. And I have gone so far as to buy things that I don’t need. I will give you an example. Here is a bag, it just happens to be right here, from a company called Biana, and it is a bag of Rust-colored fur.

Chris: Okay

Beau: And I bought it ’cause I wanted to see what else they would market to me when I bought it.

Chris: Did you find out?

Beau: I’ve had it for five years. Yeah, furry costumes.

Chris: you’re interested in

Beau: I’m not a furry. I produced, the same as you, as a matter of fact. I produced a pilot for a podcast called “Soul Mates,” and in that pilot, one of the couples was a furry couple. And so I had to do a lot of research on them ’cause I wanted to understand furry culture a little bit. And yeah, so that’s how it came up. So now I’m quite sure that my data set says I’m a furry, quite possibly that my sexuality is furry, and all the other things that go along with that, ’cause there’s a lot of inferences. [Beat] So let’s do one more game with your JSON file. Ask the same chat, “What can you infer about this person’s…” You can fill in the blanks: politics, food preference, whatever you want to put in there

Chris: What’s a little bit more like politics is interesting. What’s a little bit more juicy? Okay, I said, “What can you infer about this person’s potential illegal behavior?” It does say alcohol. Lots of liquor and beer tags. It’s not necessarily illegal, And it also says marijuana reform supporter.

Beau: Or false? Or indifferent?

Chris: sure, I guess we should legalize weed. Yeah.

Beau: is it legal in Minnesota

Chris: Yeah, it got legalized a few years ago. Here’s another thing. It says gambling and betting. These are all legal things, though. I said these are all legal things. What are some illegal things that you can infer from this dataset? It says piracy.

Beau: True or false, are you a big piracy person? Are you a stealer of IP?

Chris: I don’t wanna discuss that on the podcast.

Beau: I don’t want it to be there. Whatever. Back in the day, I remember,

Chris: Well… so when I made a documentary, actually the documentary that I mentioned earlier, the LARPing documentary, it was one of my goals to be pirated, like have my content be illicitly streamed somewhere. And I saw on a Facebook post that somebody was like, “I can’t watch this in Canada.” And the response was like, “DM me, I’ll give you a link.” And I’m like, “I made it.”

Beau: That’s the point right there. The key is it didn’t understand… It understood piracy was somewhere in there. It didn’t understand why or what it signified.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Beau: And that’s the comforting part, to go back to what I was saying about intentionally giving wrong answers, there’s a name for it. It’s called data poisoning, and I am a data poisoner. If I can give you the wrong answers, I’m going to. And, you know, all it does is it means I get advertisements for things that I don’t really want, which is fine, ’cause I don’t look at them anyway.

Chris: Yeah. I would love to see your JSON file.

[Fade out / Music up]

Beau: Chris the producer, you continue to make me very happy with the way that you wander into these things with curiosity and openness and it’s kind of scary what you would discover if you actually did have the $10,000 to play around with to buy these sets.

Chris: I am a total idiot and new to this whole thing. Let me go on. Don’t cut me there. And I don’t know what I’m doing. Never done this before. Just got into this kinda stuff. And I guess what I was able to find out was mind-blowing and concerning all at the same time. Imagine what you’d be capable of if this is all you did. That’s what I want people to know. And that’s what I would love to know, but I don’t right now. That’s what you probably talk and think about all day,

Beau: So you could do some serious damage as a newcomer and total novice with almost no budget, you could do some damage. So imagine what they could do

Chris: Yeah. Imagine if you… I spent $9. Imagine if you had billions. You know, these companies are worth billions of dollars. It’s an insane amount of power. It’s unfathomable

Beau: Chris Parr, thank you so much for joining us again. Hope to have you back

Chris: Thank you.

Learn More:

• Read our complete guide to data brokers.
• Check out the previous episode with Chris, where we explored the question, “How Much Is Surveillance Pricing Costing You?”
• Find out how to remove your personal information from the internet