The assembling of a person's information into a complete profile takes effort, and effort follows incentive. A profile is built where there is a reason to build it. For most people that reason is modest, and so the profile assembled about them is modest too. Wealth changes the calculation.

A person of significant means is, simply by virtue of that, of interest to a wide range of parties. There are those who would offer them services and want to understand them first. There are those who assess them for risk, for suitability, for opportunity. There are those whose interest is adversarial. And there are those whose interest is mere curiosity, which wealth reliably attracts. Each of these is a reason for someone to assemble a picture.

The result is that the wealthy are not assembled once but many times over, and more thoroughly each time, because the incentive justifies the effort. A profile that would not be worth completing for an ordinary person is worth completing, in detail and repeatedly, for someone of means.

There is a compounding effect as well. Wealth generates records: property, holdings, interests, dealings. Those records are exactly the raw material that aggregation runs on. So wealth both supplies more material to be assembled and supplies more parties with a reason to assemble it. The two reinforce one another.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that a person cannot reduce this attention by being discreet in their conduct. The attention is drawn by the wealth itself, not by anything the person does or says. Discretion helps with what is newly added. It does not remove the incentive that others already have to look.

What this calls for is not an attempt to be less interesting, which is not available, but a clear acceptance that one is being assembled, thoroughly and by many, and that the only sound response is to know that picture at least as well as they do.