Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of these companies, just a guy trying to get his data removed online.
My last post on here I asked for advice on how to remove my information or just straight up not use my physical home address and instead maybe a p.o box. After all the feedback I got, I decided that it wasn’t going to be possible. Also, it might not even be the bank that leaked my information but my government. Doesn’t matter too much to me but it got leaked in the first place. As I looked at my data online I noticed that every one of my family member also had their info leaked, so it very well could be the government voting and dmv databases needing to have public records.
So knowing this, that every citizen needed to have their info leaked online, what can I do about it? So there’s pretty much one option, opt out and request data removals. Now I’m too lazy to go through the sites and request opt outs for each of them. So I decided to look at paid services that do this. So far I had DeleteMe, Incogni, Optery, Norton Privacy Assist, StackSocial, PrivacyBee, EasyOptOuts, etc.
Who did I choose?
After a lengthy time of searching, I chose EasyOptOuts
TLDR; They’re $20 a year, do removals 4 times a year and they wiped my info in less than 24hrs so it’s worth every penny to me.
I wrote more about them in my blog post if you guys want to learn more.
I went through all the sites to remove my info. It took 6 months before most of it was gone, over 14 months before the last of my personally identifying info could be found on google’s cached stuff. I put probably 20-30 hours into doing it and it was a big hassle but I had more time than money.
Every one of those sites will have buried in footer a way to remove your data and you have to jump through the hoops a lot. Lots of the sites are broken and a few were really hard to get my stuff off!!
At this point though no combination of search terms on any public search engine finds me, with the singular exception of a public business registration I made which is a permanent public record and you need an impossible get court order to remove that.
Congrats going through that whole ordeal. Hope it was worth it.
I mostly did it out of annoyance to be honest, having my info out there never did me any harm that I’m aware of it’s just the principle! Plus I have been online since you could be online so I had a decently large footprint. I like this relative anonymity more though the internet isn’t as nice of a place as it used to be.
Thank you!
I went with Kanary because it covered quite a lot and it is frequent, at least once a month - but EasyOptOuts does look like it’s worth the money.
I was shocked when I saw they were $20. Pretty damn effective too. Highly recommend to give a try. They don’t ask for ID or anything so you’re not giving up anything that’s already out there.
All the other sites I looked into like Kanary had a bunch of trackers. Easyoptouts was the least bloated I have ever seen. No trackers at all. I actually filled out information and tried to click submit but it wouldn’t let me because I had JavaScript disabled.
Afaik that’s impossible in our current system, because of big data inferences and lack of control over our meta data.
