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A few years ago, Ken Crum started getting uncomfortable with how much of his life seemed to be online. The long-time computer programmer was particularly concerned by what companies appeared to know about him. The amount of personal information was mind-boggling to the 66-year-old Texan, who recently moved from Dallas to the small town of Weatherford. Data brokers were collecting his personal details. Social media was targeting ads at him. Then one day, after shopping at a local home improvement store, he got an email from the company asking how his visit was. While he can't be absolutely certain, he's pretty sure the company used location-tracking on his work phone to find him. He found it all unnerving. So Crum decided to pull himself off most social media, keeping just his LinkedIn account. He quit using Google in favor of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that promises to protect user privacy. He deleted tracking-prone "app crap" — his words — from his smartphone. And he tried to wrestle as much of his personal information back from the data brokers as possible, paying for a subscription to DeleteMe, a service that helps people remove information from databases. The data collection doesn't stop there. Your Yelp review of a pizza parlor or a comment you posted on your local newspaper's website all become part of your digital profile. They're used by marketers trying to get you to buy something, to support a policy, or to vote for a candidate. There are oodles of data about you. Most of that info is largely free for the taking. As you'd expect, there's no shortage of companies looking to profit from it. At last count, there were about 540 data brokers operating in the US, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, which based its estimate on numbers from data broker registries maintained by California and Vermont. The skyrocketing amount of consumer data online has also given cybercriminals new opportunities to exploit your personal details for identity theft, online scams, or other kinds of fraud. Once cybercriminals get your data, they use it to try to bust into your accounts or sell it to other cybercrooks. Get breached once and you may spend years cleaning up the mess. (Here's how to remove your personal information from the internet.) Creating massive databases of consumer profiles has gotten easier in recent years because of advances in artificial intelligence technology that allow for better cross-referencing and correcting of data, says John Gilmore, Abine's head of research. The databases are bigger and more accurate than ever. Though many people worry data brokers are mining their social media accounts for personal information to feed those databases, Gilmore says the vast majority of information comes from voter registration rolls, property and court records, and other conventional public sources. Still, smaller, questionably legitimate data farmers are likely scraping social media, as well as buying stolen consumer data off the dark web, Gilmore says. Worse, cybercriminals and extremists groups have used these methods. A few years ago, members of the alt-right — a loose collection of neo-Nazis and white supremacists — attempted to create data profiles of supposed far-left activists with the intent of using the data to dox and harass them. Those groups have a lot of data to work with these days. People have unwittingly become "data creators," Velasquez says. The digital footprint produced by the average person goes well beyond Facebook oversharing. Keeping tabs on the data created by online shopping, online entertainment and simply surfing the internet goes well beyond the capabilities of most people. More in-depth details are posted on OUR FORUM.