Who sold my phone number?

One of the most persistent irritations for many South Africans is the volume of unsolicited marketing calls. Last year, the problem escalated to the point where I was receiving, on average, three to four such calls a day. On one particularly bad day, that number reached eight.

As a journalist, I also receive a significant number of legitimate calls from the Moneyweb community, many of which appear only as unfamiliar numbers. This makes it difficult to screen calls and avoid unsolicited contact. The eight-calls-day prompted me to investigate where my personal contact details were being sourced.

I began with a series of online searches and was struck by how widely my information was available on the internet. My contact details were publicly available on a number of international database platforms, including ContactOut, Datanyze, FlashIntel, PIPL and RocketReach. These platforms market access to such information to companies for use in sales prospecting and direct marketing campaigns.

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They also boast about the scale and depth of their databases as part of their offering. Across these platforms, a significant amount of personal information about me was listed. This included standard details such as my name, phone number, email address and professional designation.

However, in aggregate, the platforms also reflected more extensive information, including my date of birth, academic qualifications, stated interests and a personal email address that I have deliberately tried to keep out of the public domain. I engaged with these platforms, and each provided links allowing me to “opt out” and request the deletion of my details from their databases. In some cases, they also indicated that such requests would be passed on to third parties to whom the data had been supplied.

They did not disclose the identity of these third parties. Several also indicated that they do not consider themselves bound by the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia), as they are based outside South Africa. I opted out of these services.

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