myContentGuard Explores the 'Wild-Wild West'’ Industry of Selling your Voting Records

You’ve probably received an unsolicited email, phone call, or text message from a political campaign that you’ve never signed up for and wondered why. The answer could be extremely disturbing to someone who takes their privacy seriously. The selling and purchasing of your voting records is mostly an unregulated industry and often considered the ‘wild-wild west’ of Big Data, detailed by myContentGuard.com below.

In many states, your voting data can be accessed for free while other states require a hefty fee to obtain access. Political campaigns frequently purchase these records to supplement their marketing campaigns, a standard practice. Some states have laws that prevent selling to private for profit companies, however, many do not.

A voting record usually includes a name, address, phone, and party affiliation. For private companies this isn’t enough information to go off of. That’s when Data Brokers come into play. If you’ve ever searched your name online, you’ve probably seen websites like Whitepages and Spokeo that claim to reveal your dozens of details about your life.

Companies combine voting records with Data Broker information to create a near complete profile about you. For example: are you a registered republican, married with two children, and make under one hundred thousand dollars a year? Are you a registered independent, twice divorced, own a boat, and over the age of 60? This is how specific companies can target individuals, and the options are almost endless. 

myContentGuard.com Data Broker Removals

If you value your privacy then you can prevent being on these data lists by using myContentGuard’s data broker removal services. myContentGuard.com searches the major search engines and data brokers and submits removal requests once your private data is located. Information that’s removed includes:

• Political Party Affiliation

• Your name, current and past addresses, phone number and family

• Income, employment status, home value

• And much more based on how much information brokers have collected on you

Preventing Data Brokers And Private Companies To Use Your Data

There aren’t many laws that protect consumers in this very unregulated and confusing industry. California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is often considered a champion of consumer privacy, but the CCPA only goes so far. Data Brokers and private companies scrape and update their profitable lists daily to sell ‘fresh’ data to interested buyers. Ultimately, the only way to prevent your data from being on a list is to remove yourself from Data Brokers. myContentGuard does this on your behalf and continuously monitors these brokers to make sure new data doesn’t get reposted online.

About myContentGuard

myContentGuard is more than just a monitoring service. We search hundreds of thousands of websites and dozens of major search engines to locate your unwanted personal info.