Before a single vendor ever emails you, there's a good chance your name, title, work email, and direct-dial number are already sitting in a database you never agreed to be in.
Sources linked throughout this page.
ZoomInfo and Apollo.io sit at the center of a large, mature industry built on aggregating and reselling professional contact data. ZoomInfo's database includes more than 300 million contacts, while Apollo's spans roughly 200 to 275 million contacts across tens of millions of companies. The two platforms serve different ends of the market: ZoomInfo is priced for enterprise buyers, with a median annual contract around $31,875 and starting list prices near $15,000/year, while Apollo takes a self-serve approach starting at $49 per user per month, with a free tier. Effectively lowering the barrier for any sales team to buy access to your details.
Neither company primarily asks you directly for your information. Instead, data arrives through a few well-documented channels:
The common thread: you're rarely the one who put your information there, and you're almost never asked first.
This isn't a hypothetical concern. In 2024, ZoomInfo agreed to pay $29.55 million to settle a class action (Ramos et al. v. ZoomInfo Technologies) covering residents of California, Illinois, Indiana, and Nevada, who alleged the company used their personal information (names, business addresses, work history, job titles) on public preview pages to advertise subscriptions, without consent. ZoomInfo did not admit wrongdoing. Weeks later, a separate class action was filed in Washington state making similar allegations under that state's Personality Rights Act, and ZoomInfo has separately faced complaints alleging it accessed the full content of users' email inboxes through its contributor program without adequately disclosing that to non-subscribers.
None of this means the companies are unique villains. This is simply how the current B2B data-broker business model tends to operate. It's the model itself that's the problem.
This is the exact dynamic Moniker is built to avoid on the buyer side of the table. Instead of your real identity becoming a permanent, resellable row across databases you never opted into, you engage with vendors through a verified alias you control. One you can reset entirely, at any time, with no downstream database still holding your real details because you dropped them in a demo form.
There's a second, quieter half to this. Brokers build the database; visitor-identification vendors then use it to put your name to an anonymous website visit, no form required. That piece explains the mechanism step by step, and which links in the chain you can actually break.
See how Moniker works → Read the full researched case → Opt-out toolkit →