Forewarn gives realtors access to buyers' histories with a phone number

> saying it would be unethical to only use Forewarn’s data to determine whom to work with. As part of her job, Hicks is responsible for ensuring the realtors she manages are as financially successful as possible.

So discrimination is ok because you know, we have to make as much money as possible

This type of stuff is a prime example of our laws lagging behind technology. All these companies that hoover up personal information and sell it on the gray market should be regulated out of existence. Does the EU stand for this type of thing?

I've just sent them a notice letter to delete my personal information under CA Consumer Privacy Act and they declined and I am pursuing further. If anyone would like to send a similar notice, it's very easy through https://yourdigitalrights.org/

This is obviously a terrible invasion of privacy, but that is not the only problem.

Information on credit reports is routinely wrong, and there in many cases it is virtually impossible to remove. I've had some random addresses listed as "previous addresses" on my credit report for decades, and no matter what sort of letters I write or how many hoops I jump through, they remain.

I got a new phone number last year, and still occasionally receive calls from whoever it was in South Carolina who previously had this number. What are the odds that a realtor is getting that person's data, instead of mine?

What if you are on a family plan, it is a business phone, or registered in someone else's name?

These may sound like edge cases but even if it is only 5% of people that's tens of millions of people in the USA alone who could potentially get screwed by this.

People genuinely have no idea how much information is out there about them. Not just from hacks but from “legitimate” sources like data brokers.

Part of me thinks it would be a service for some newspaper to just publish a searchable website of all of it, so people can really feel the impact of it. It would be impossible to ignore. Or maybe just the info for all politicians in Washington.

Of course, this would enable all of the bottom-feeding scammers to get it too, so it would probably do more harm than good.

I am not sure why realtors haven't become obsolete in hot markets at least on the sellers side. 5% is a lot of money when your home is so valuable. Plus it's such a sellers market, where it seems like all the marketing you might have to do is put a listing with a couple terrible grainy photos on zillow and you will get 10 all cash offers by the end of the week. You don't even really need to bother with mls anymore which was the old artificial moat for the real estate profession. Buying side might be a different case, but at least as a seller I don't think you need to bother with taking nice photos, staging, marketing, hosting open houses, etc anymore. Times have changed.

Hilarious how it's terror and/or think of the children nearly every time a privacy busting product or law is being pushed through or justified.

Attacks on Real Estate Agents: Be Prepared

Last month, the attack on a real estate agent in Encino, California, was brought to light as the incident was caught on camera. While we have all heard stories regarding the increase in attacks on agents, seeing it happen live on video made it very real for many and greatly impacted the agent community. No one wants to go to work afraid, not knowing who they will encounter each day.

Above is from Forewarn's blog https://www.forewarn.com/blog/attacks-on-real-estate-agents-...

Haven't been able to find a deletion opt out for Red Violet specifically, but google did turn up this portal for one of their subsidiaries:

https://www.ididata.com/deletion-request/

Looks like they do not care about CCPA or GDPR.

https://www.forewarn.com/opt-out-policy/

Considering every online retailer asks for your phone number, I'm not surprised. The shopping history Shopify has one everyone is also a goldmine.

I used to work for a company that gathered data about doctor's licenses and sanctions. All 50 States do it a little different and I helped with scraping some of the data. Sometimes we would have to buy the lists of sanctioned doctors--think about that, a State putting the list of board sanctioned doctors behind a paywall.

So, while every real estate agent has cheap and instant access to all this data, the public is behind a paywall to see which doctors have been sanctioned. Where did we go wrong?

> Although some real estate agents say the financial information it returns saves time when finding clients most likely to have the budget for the houses they’re looking at, most agents and associations tout it primarily as a safety tool because it also supplies criminal records.

> In addition to those records, the product — owned by the data broker red violet — also supplies a given individual’s address history; phone, vehicle and property records; bankruptcies; and liens and judgements, including foreclosure histories.

> “It can be real creepy and you have to swear that you’re not going to use it in a wrong manner,” Hicks added, referring to Forewarn rules which say real estate agents can’t share data from the app publicly or with third parties, or use the app to pull information on non-professional contacts.

And with ~1.5M Realtors in the US, working for ~1/3M real estate firms, you know there will only be a trivial number of cases where it this product is misused...right?