(WAVY) -- Did you get a text this week from someone alleging to be the Department of Motor Vehicles? After a swarm of scam texts, you may be left wondering how your personal information fell into malicious hands.
Nexstar's WAVY went looking for answers. It turns out, you may have handed over your information willingly, but unknowingly.
Lena Cohen works with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Cohen said it's likely your information was unknowingly sold for profit.
"We want to make sure that the rights you have offline come with you when you use the Internet," Cohen said. "We live in a country without a comprehensive federal privacy law, so your personal data has been freely harvested and sold for a long time."
Woman dies from brain-eating amoeba after using tap water to clear sinuses: CDCIt has become a bigger issue for all consumers. There are three main ways your information can get into the hands of what are called "data brokers," including public records, loyalty programs or commercial transactions, and digital footprints or cookies. Data brokers take your information and sell it to other people like a product. From there, it can be used in a variety of ways.
Phone numbers, relatives, your location history, and more are sold — all up for sale by data brokers who collect it from the places you'd least expect.
"They do collect data from public records like marriage records, housing records," Cohen said. "They collect data by scraping social media sites. They also buy data from other companies, grocery stores, retail stores. Even credit card companies have been caught sharing data with data brokers."
If you think the extent of you're information being bought, sold, or leaked is a spam text, you're wrong. Experts said this secretive broker industry is considerably dangerous, specifically for national security.
To prove a point, in 2023, researchers at Duke University purchased huge amounts of data from brokers. They set up a server in Singapore where brokers sold private data about active-duty service members, veterans, and their families. The report's authors didn't buy mental health or location data, though that information was also for sale.
Brokers also sold bulk data for people within geofenced military facilities, such as Fort Bragg and Quantico.
The pipeline of information varies depending on the initial collector of the data.
"Sometimes there are direct partnerships between apps and data brokers to collect your data," Cohen said. "Sometimes the connection is a little more distant. Apps share information with an advertising system, and then that advertising system, in order to select what ads to show you, broadcast a lot of information about you to a lot of potential advertisers. But a lot of those potential advertisers are actually data brokers scooping up your data, and there's nothing stopping them."
Earn less than $200K? Your family can afford to live comfortably in only 7 states, report findsOnly a handful of states are protecting users' information online by allowing residents to compel more than 500 data broker organizations to delete their information with the push of a button.
You may, however, still need to secure your information on your own.
"It really just goes to show how underregulated this industry is," Cohen said. "We know relatively little about data brokers. Who they are, who they're selling to, what information they have about us ... and they know basically everything about us."
WAVY put together a simplified tutorial for easy steps you can take right now:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a variety of tools to help you protect your information.
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