EXPOSED: Your identity sells for less than $1
The article highlights that personal identity data is sold by data brokers for as little as a few cents. It explains that such information can be used for scams, spam, and identity fraud. The piece promotes Incogni as a service that removes personal data from broker databases.
- ▪Data brokers sell detailed personal profiles for a few dollars or even cents.
- ▪The sold information includes addresses, phone numbers, relatives, and property history.
- ▪This cheap data fuels scams, spam, and identity fraud.
- ▪Incogni offers to automatically remove individuals' information from hundreds of broker databases.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/29/exposed-your-identity-sells-for-less-than-1.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:24:07 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T15:45:59.847Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T15:45:59.847Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | p2lfjqU77W-Z · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
EXPOSED: Your identity sells for less than $1 Advertiser 8:24 am Wed Jul 29, 2026 Image: Incogni Boing Boing welcomes our sponsor, Incogni! In the data broker market, personal profiles are cheap. For a few dollars—or sometimes cents—buyers can access detailed records about real people. Addresses. Phone numbers. Relatives. Property history. That information fuels scams, spam, and identity fraud. Incogni helps shut down that pipeline by removing your personal information from hundreds of broker databases automatically. Stop your data from being sold. Try Incogni today and get 55% off annual plans with code BOINGDEAL.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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