Public Records vs. Data Brokers: What's the Difference (And Why It Matters)

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, one of the largest data brokers in the country, says its files include data from 1.5 billion bankruptcy records, 6.5 billion personal property records, 6.6 billion motor vehicle registrations, and over 37 billion public records tied to criminal investigations (Tom Kemp). None of that came from a hack. All of it is legal. The vast majority of what data brokers know about you was never private to begin with.

One-sentence answer: Public records are documents the government is legally required to make available (court filings, property deeds, voter rolls); data brokers are private companies that scrape, aggregate, and resell those records — and you generally can't remove the underlying record, only the broker's republished copy.

TL;DR

• The default source of broker data is public records — not data breaches, not "the dark web."
• Public records are public for a reason: democratic transparency in court, property, and elections.
• You generally cannot remove yourself from the source. You can reduce how brokers re-publish it.
• Narrow legal exceptions exist for survivors of domestic violence, stalking, and trafficking via state Address Confidentiality Programs.
• This is a structural problem, not a personal failure. But there are still personal moves that help.

What "public record" actually means

In US law, a public record is a document created by a government body in the course of its work, that the government is required to make available to the public on request. Categories include:

• Court filings — civil suits, criminal cases, divorces, bankruptcies, small claims.
• Property records — deeds, mortgages, property tax assessments, foreclosures.
• Vital records — marriages, divorces, sometimes birth records (varies by state).
• Business filings — corporate registrations, fictitious-name (DBA) filings, UCC liens.
• Voter registration — name, address, party affiliation, voting history (the fact you voted, not the ballot).
• Professional licenses — doctors, lawyers, contractors, real estate agents, cosmetologists.
• Motor vehicle records — varies by state under the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act, but registration data is widely accessible.

These exist because democracy requires them. You're allowed to see who bought the house next door. Reporters are allowed to check whether a judge has financial conflicts. Background-check companies can verify that the doctor your kid sees has a valid license. The categories exist for reasons most people, on reflection, want to keep.

How brokers turn "public" into "everywhere"

The legal framing of public records assumed friction. To look up a property deed in 1970, you went to the county courthouse. To check voter rolls, you visited the registrar's office. The cost of looking up one person was a couple of hours of your day. The cost of looking up everyone was prohibitive.

Digitization erased the friction. Now a single company can scrape every county courthouse in the country, normalize the data, and link it to every other public record for the same person. As one Lawfare analysis put it, "digitizing information, aggregating it, and linking it to specific individuals meaningfully changes the context of the data — and the risk to people" (Lawfare).

A divorce filing was always technically public. But the version where a stalker can pull your name, see your divorce date, cross-reference it with the property record showing you bought a new house, then layer in your voter registration to confirm your current address — that version is new. The records are public. The aggregation is the change.

This is the same point we made in our pillar post on why the link is the risk. One public record is mostly fine. The joined profile is the harm.

What about commercial data?

Brokers also buy data — purchase histories from loyalty programs, browsing data from ad networks, app telemetry, magazine subscriptions, warranty registrations. That commercial layer adds inferred attributes (income, household composition, health interests) that public records don't supply.

But the spine of a broker profile is almost always public-record data: name, address history, age, relatives, employer history, property ownership, court records. The commercial overlay enriches it. The public records make it findable.

This is also where the government buys its way around the warrant requirement — by purchasing aggregated public-records-plus-commercial profiles from the same brokers, agencies get a complete picture that would otherwise require legal process to obtain.

The honest part: you mostly can't remove the source

If a divorce filing exists in a county courthouse, you cannot make the courthouse forget. You cannot make the property recorder delete the deed showing you own your home. You cannot make the voter registrar remove your name from a list that statute requires them to maintain.

You can sometimes:

• Seal court records — possible for juvenile cases, expunged criminal convictions, some sealed civil settlements. Requires a court order.
• Redact specific personal information — some states allow address redaction for judges, law enforcement, prosecutors, and other listed professions.
• Use a substitute address — via state Address Confidentiality Programs (see below).
• Petition for a confidential name change — narrow, expensive, mostly only for survivors of abuse.

What you can't do is opt out of being publicly recorded as the owner of your home, the party to your divorce, or a registered voter. The system is designed to prevent that. (And that's mostly good — opaque property ownership is how money laundering works.)

What you can do: reduce the re-publishing

The leverage point is between the public record and the broker. You can't stop the courthouse from holding the file. You can make it harder for brokers to find, scrape, and re-publish that file's contents against your name.

This is the entire reason data broker opt-outs exist. They don't delete the underlying record. They remove the broker's copy from their database — which removes it from the broker's customer-facing search, from the broker's data feeds to advertisers, and from the broker's licensed exports to other companies. The record stays in the courthouse. It stops being one click away.

It's a slower fight than people want. Removed records get re-added when the broker next refreshes from public sources. That's why we explain in our primer on what a data broker actually is that the work is continuous, not one-time.

The narrow legal escape hatch: Address Confidentiality Programs

If you are a survivor of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, trafficking, or in some states an at-risk worker (reproductive health, judges, prosecutors), most US states run Address Confidentiality Programs (ACPs) that give you a substitute legal address.

California's program, Safe at Home, was established in 1999. It offers a substitute address that state, county, and city government agencies are legally required to accept in place of a residential one (CA Secretary of State). Participants can also register as confidential voters and, in some cases, petition for a confidential name change under California Government Code §6205. There's no fee for eligible survivors.

Similar programs exist in nearly every state:

• New York: Address Confidentiality Program, run by the Office of the New York State Department of State.
• Illinois: Address Confidentiality Program through the Illinois Attorney General.
• Washington: ACP through the Secretary of State.
• Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon: All run analogous programs.

ACPs are powerful but narrow. They don't help the average person who just wants to be less Googleable. They are specifically a legal accommodation for people in physical danger. If that's you or someone you know, search your state's name plus "Address Confidentiality Program."

What you can do today

1. Accept the structural piece. You won't delete yourself from court filings or property records. Frame the work as reducing re-publication, not erasure.
2. File data broker opt-outs. The republished profile is the part you can remove. Start with the major people-search sites and work down.
3. Use Google's "Results About You." It doesn't delete the source, but it removes the search result that exposes it.
4. If you qualify for an ACP, apply. If you're a survivor of DV, stalking, sexual assault, trafficking, or a covered worker, your state likely has a program. It's free.
5. Treat this as ongoing. Brokers re-pull from public records every 30–90 days. Removal is a maintenance task. Calendar it.

The CTA

The honest pitch: there is no product that erases you from public records, and any company that implies they do is selling you a fantasy. What's actually possible is continuous broker cleanup — finding the republished copies and filing eligible opt-outs faster than the brokers can re-add them. That's what Leak Check Me helps with. One scrub mission is $20; relisting patrol is $19/month. You shouldn't need a subscription forever, but you do need the work to be continuous while it's happening.

Sources

• Tom Kemp — A Closer Look at Data Brokers' Sources of Data
• Lawfare — People Search Data Brokers, Stalking, and 'Publicly Available Information' Carve-Outs
• California Secretary of State — Safe at Home
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse — Data Brokers
• MakeUseOf — 7 Types of Public Records That Data Brokers Collect