Use this interactive chart to explore the Top 50 Biggest Data Brokers (ranked by number of pages indexed in Google).

What People Search Sites are really good at is stoking people’s psychology. They have all of these devices that have been built up over decades through trial and error that are are designed to get people to take the next step, to garner more curiosity, to get them to complete a form or to get them to hand over their credit card.

Finding out that data brokers sell personal information of yours that you didn’t offer to them to begin with can be disturbing, and the fact that it’s gone unregulated for so long makes it a little bit scarier as far as the information that you can actually find out about other people now.

Data brokers are companies that collect information on consumers and then sell that information to other companies. And the data broker ecosystem is vast.It’s a galaxy of companies that exist in this space. Most of the data brokers ordinary people don’t know who they are or that they exist. The ones that peek their heads out of the shadows the most are data brokers that we call People Search Sites.

What data brokers would do is go out and scrape the web, and also gather public records databases for free. They could license data from companies like LexisNexis or Acxiom or Epsilon, and then they could just publish all of that information to the Web. They could put ads on the website, and then they would have millions of pages of content indexed in Google.