What Bighound refuses to store

Most services describe how carefully they handle sensitive data. We’d rather not hold it.

The refused list

Bighound will not store, at any point:

• Full date of birth (we take the year only)
• Social Security number
• Driver’s licence or state ID number
• Passport number
• Bank account or card numbers
• Photographs of identity documents

If a field like this reaches our API, it’s rejected outright rather than saved.

Why these specifically

Not because they’re secret — several are printed on documents you hand to strangers. Because they’re the fields that turn a profile into an impersonation. A full DOB plus a name and an address is most of what someone needs to open credit. A birth year disambiguates you from a relative just as well and doesn’t do that.

The general rule: if a field’s main use to an attacker is becoming you, we don’t want it, regardless of what it would buy us in match accuracy.

What we do store, and how

Names, addresses, city, state, ZIP, birth year, phone numbers, email addresses, usernames — the things brokers publish about you, which are what we need to recognise their listings.

All of it is encrypted field-by-field at rest with a key derived per account. Lookups that need to happen without decryption use a keyed one-way index, so we can match a record without reading it.

Some brokers require ID

A few demand a photo ID to process a removal. Bighound flags those and routes them to you — you deal with them directly, and the document never touches us.