What reason is there to trust that the more shady brokers aren't just updating your record with IP address + 'sent an opt-out request' flag, making the data even more valuable?
I won't miss Twitter one bit.
CCPA says: "Businesses also should not require you to verify your identity, though they can ask you basic questions to identify which personal information is associated with you."[0]
The worst is that some of the bigger services (intelius, who provides data for many of these sites) have begun to require opt-outs come from an email address that they already have on file for you. Really need to legislate these companies out of existence.
I don't see the harm in pasting in the info I can see they already have, in a request to remove it.
There's a catch 22 where you have to be comfortable enough to submit your information to these sites' opt out pages in order for them to take it down. But if you do nothing, it continues to proliferate unchecked.
Most people don't have the time or inclination to submit opt out requests to data brokers directly, let alone stay on top of when information inevitably pops back up. This is where data removal services like Optery come in, but there's also a similar catch 22 where you have to trust the company you're using. Most companies in the data removal space are trustworthy, but some are not. Along the lines of trustworthiness, one of the most underrated attributes of a data removal service is its security credentials. Optery has its SOC 2, Type II security certification, whereas most other services do not.
If you already use a different service such as DeleteMe, Kanary, or Incogni, you can run a free Optery scan to see what they've missed. The free Optery scan typically produces 50 - 100 screenshots of places your info is published online.
Optery was launched to the public on HackerNews as a Show HN before we got into YC, and again as a Launch HN after we got into YC. Lots of great insights on the topic of removing info from data brokers in those threads:
The truly free ones tend to have a tab to search by just a phone number, and you'll never get a fake loading bar.
At one point they accurately listed every address I've ever lived at, relations, phone numbers, email addresses, and even some usernames I can only assume were linked to me as part of some database breach. A few years ago I went through and "opted out" of a bunch of these services for myself and a few of my family members. Looks like I'm still unlisted/removed 2-3 years later.
That sounds like puffery. Has anyone ever suffered a documented consequence along those lines?
From here https://inteltechniques.com/workbook.html:
> The “MOST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK” removals: Spokeo, Mylife, Radaris, Whitepages, Intelius, BeenVerified, Acxiom, Infotracer, Lexis Nexis, TruePeopleSearch
(I'm well aware that outsourcing the job carries its own risks... nonetheless there's an opportunity here.)
I assume they wouldn't just "undo" their opt-outs?
I'd prefer a one-time payment over that darn subscription-recurring-revenue-model.
Doing this work is tough/timeconsuming but can be done DIY. We're working on automating it at scale. YC gave us a grant in 2018 for this work.
Automating this sounds simple but gets extremely complex to scale. - evading cloudflare - solving captchas - managing site footprint (think about google's algo to crawl the web) - ux / product design (how should we communicate to members if a site is an a$$?) - identity matching...
At the end of the day, we need better regulations in the US to help us wrangle the data broker industry. Hand in hand with more advanced technology for monitoring and holding this industry accountable... that seems the best path fwd.
Tried doing a few when something similar was posted 5 years back and a couple of months later my data was still showing up, but now with a green check-mark next to it. So learn from my mistakes and try to avoid interacting with these at all; maybe instead shoot a message to your representative asking for more legal privacy protections.
Data Broker Opt-Out List - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24388803 - Sept 2020 (162 comments)
https://netzpolitik.org/2023/eu-country-comparison-how-data-...
We'd like Cloudflare to be a little more helpful, but they just let harmful sites block people who don't want to share their info / location / browser fingerprint under the guise of 'stopping bots'.
