Kashmir Hill reports on what she discovered when she managed to get her file from a company that produces — and sells — analyses of consumers (consumer scores):
… Most recently, in April, The Journal’s Christopher Mims looked at a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. “Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, “yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.”
As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking:
Read more on NY Times. When you read how much detailed minutiae and messages from years ago they had obtained and stored about her, well, it is a tad frightening, to say the least. Her article also tells you had to obtain your information from a number of these companies.
The form to request data from them requires providing more data that probably are not connected to any of the data they already have.
While I’d like to see the data they have on me, providing data that I’ve tried very hard to keep off the internet and disconnected from each other isn’t worth the price.
Yeah. That’s the Catch-22. They may already know it about you (what you’ve tried hard to protect), but you can’t find out without taking some risks of exposing info that they don’t have.