Ask HN: Best service to remove you from data brokers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Best service to remove you from data brokers?

#51

Post by HenryBemis » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #42

plants wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so absurd. why is it $129/year to remove myself from lists that I didn't consent to be added to in the first place?

It’s all about how proactive you want to be. Generally you can do it for free if you know where to remove data from. The people search engines make it intentionally complicated to find their removal links and they make it like an 18-step process unnecessarily. See https://www.removemyphone.com/learn/intelius-removal-guide for instance. That said, I wish some (not all, but some) European style personal data protection…

> 7. Periodically repeat the previous steps. As their data sources and crawlers can find your data again, there's always a possibility that your data will show up again in the future. Monitoring it for the long-haul is super important.

Oh I laughed so hard on that 7.!!! Why can't they just sinkhole your name/number/data so that anyone trying to add you it will be auto-deleted?? Nice scummy behaviour, but I guess they simple call this "business/operating model".

Re: Ask HN: Best service to remove you from data brokers?

#52

Post by Ingosla » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

leipert wrote: post #45

derwiki wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason you pay for trash removal of physical junk mail that’s delivered to your house

In Germany you can put a „no ads“ sticker on your mailbox and it works. In case someone puts ads into your mailbox anyhow, you can report them to the consumer protection agency and they risk a fine. This actually works.

Well, I lived in Germany for a long time and had that sticker on my mailbox, but still got them. Though less than anywhere else, so it does scare some, but not all of them.

Re: Ask HN: Best service to remove you from data brokers?

#53

Post by poletopole » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

I used to work for a pair of real estate investors involved in a pyramid scheme in my early days as a developer. The investors would pay a lot of money to access a data broker to find houses that were, for example, going through foreclosure, short sale, arbitration, etc. We got some pretty violent phone calls regarding how exactly we knew what we did—your home is usually the last thing you want to lose next.

There isn’t any panacea for scrubbing your data from these brokers. All the spam email, texts, calls, or even snail mail most of the time are coming from hydras like the real investors I mentioned, not large companies. Personally, I’m so sick of spam emails, smses, and calls that I’m just going to bite the bullet and start over by making an anonymous email/sms/voip service with Twilio (I did this professionally for 7 years) and put an end to it all.

Re: Ask HN: Best service to remove you from data brokers?

#54

Post by Santosh83 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #31

I'd love it if there was a national "Do Not SMS" list. (Especially during this US election season). Though I'd assume companies like Twilio would massively lobby against it.

India tried this. But was a big failure. Getting on the list was non-trivial and it wasn't enforced well anyway. Of course that isn't to say the US can't do better, but general consumer rights is down in the dumps these days...

Re: Ask HN: Best service to remove you from data brokers?

#55

Post by lobster45 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

plants wrote: post #17

4d66ba06 wrote: post #11

I use https://joindeleteme.com/ and it seems to work well

so absurd. why is it $129/year to remove myself from lists that I didn't consent to be added to in the first place?

How much is your time worth? Doing it manually is a pain in the ass and takes a lot of time. Deleteme is not perfect, but they do a pretty good job. Customer since 2010