The largest holders of information about a private person are, in most cases, companies that the person has never knowingly dealt with. They are not the principal's bank or telephone company; they are the firms whose business is to assemble information about people from many other sources and to sell the assembled file to whoever wants it.

The data they hold is, in itself, ordinary. Names, addresses, dates of birth, professional histories, family connections, property records, court records where any, the contact details that have appeared in any of the leaks that have happened in the years since the principal first went online. None of this would, on its own, be a matter of comment. Assembled, it is a thorough profile.

The principal's relationship with the broker is non-existent in the sense that the principal has not entered into one. The principal's relationship with the broker is, however, real in the sense that the broker holds, in many cases, the most detailed file on the principal that exists anywhere outside the principal's own bank and government.

The principal can, in most jurisdictions, exercise some rights with these companies. The right to know what is held. The right to have inaccurate information corrected. The right, in some jurisdictions, to have the data removed, or at least restricted, on certain bases. Each right is real; each requires a request to each broker, which the broker is obliged to handle but is not always swift about.

The work in this category is patient and well-suited to a desk like this one. It is about identifying the brokers who hold the most influential profiles on the principal, exercising the rights that are available, and ensuring that the corrections are propagated to the downstream customers of the broker who have purchased the file. The brokers do not always do this gracefully; with attention, they generally do it.