DeleteMe’s annual PII report is now available, and its findings paint a grim picture for U.S. consumers, whose personal information is often widely available without their consent.
BOSTON, March 8, 2023: Online privacy company DeleteMe has released its annual PII Marketplace Report, which demonstrates just how much of people’s personal information is available on the web amid growing concerns about data privacy.
Personal identifiable information, or PII, is any piece of private information that can be used to identify an individual, such as an email address, home address, phone number, date of birth, social media accounts, or even financial assets. Many pieces of PII are public record, gleaned from entities like voter registration files. But data brokers then aggregate this personal information into datasets and sell them to third parties – without the public’s knowledge or consent.
Online PII availability boomed during the pandemic years, doubling between 2020 and 2021, driven by millions of new people shifting to online platforms for remote work, distance schooling, and social networking.
Growth has since slowed in 2022, but PII brokerage continues to be a lucrative industry dominated by a few key players, with over 90 percent of PII discoverable on Google coming from just 20 data brokers.
The 2022 report also found that U.S. consumer PII exposure differed dramatically from users in other countries. In fact, the average American had nearly ten times more PII exposure than international users of the DeleteMe platform.
“Reduced PII exposure for other nationalities isn’t necessarily indicative of fantastic legal privacy protections for users overseas, but rather demonstrates the pervasive abuse of PII that exists as business norms in the U.S.,” explained Rob Shavell, CEO of DeleteMe.
The shift to online work has also inevitably had an effect on employee PII exposure. The report found that B2B employee information exposure was about 30 percent higher than that of consumers, due to a larger number of professional data networking sites exposing PII including LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and networking forums like conference directories.
Americans are increasingly anxious about the amount of their data being collected, with over 70 percent feeling it’s “challenging to control” who can access their personal information online.
