[bigyikes]

I don’t necessarily doubt you, but do you have any source for this, or in general any information on the landscape of data brokers?

It’s hard to imagine what the situation actually looks like behind the scenes.

[micromacrofoot]

there are a handful of large data brokers like lexisnexis, they’ll sell their scraped public data to anyone

random companies will buy the data, do a little collation and merge datasets from multiple sources, start their own frontend, and resell it to consumers doing google searches for phone numbers, names, etc

because they’re not directly affiliated with the primary brokers, there are hundreds of these independent frontends… and unless you contact each one, they can all resell their data (even to each other)

so if you miss one removal, it’s possible your data gets picked up by a new frontend from that frontend… your data can kind of proliferate through this gross ether forever