Credit Agencies Sell Your Information

Ever wonder how companies find out so much information about you? How you end up on email lists or in databases? One of the ways this happens is that Credit agencies sell your personal information. For instance, companies who have a name and address, or an email address for a potential customer, but lack other information will purchase the rest from credit agencies. Large corporations buy data which include the number of cars you own, your mortgage information, square footage of your house, your employer etc. So for example, Home Depot is wanting to conduct an email campaign and track its customers who receive the email both for online purchases and offline purchases. In order to populate their lists, they will use information from their customer databases. However, if they have customer name’s and address, but no email, they will contact credit agencies and purchase the email information that is associated with the name and address Home Depot provides. After they purchase your email address and correlate it with your address, they send you the email.

Kind of scary how companies can purchase personal information. And how do the credit agencies get this information? Your mortgage application.