I have a paid premium subscription with optery. I provided them with minimal informed and have been pleased thus far. Good customer service. Fairly quick response time. For years, I've performed monthly searches on my name and naturally submit opt-out requests from whatever data brokers I found. I signed up for optery using a couple discounts from stack social (or one of those sites). They found DOZENS of listings un…
Just hijacking the top comment to point out that Optery's onboarding process is deliberately misleading in an attempt to get you to subscribe to a paid tier. I signed up as "Notareal Personxxx." I listed my city as "Detroit, MI." I'm shown a list of 202 domains under the heading "Websites exposing your personal information." I click "More information" next to one of the listed websites. A modal appears: >> Notareal P…
Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
81–90 of 150 posts
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#82https://removaly.com/category/comparisons/
Both Removaly and Optery are pretty solid, but if you want something your friends and family can actually afford, then nothing beats EasyOptOuts.
$20 a year and they're pretty good at what they do. The only catch is that while services like Removaly do daily scans (no other player in this game does it at that high of a frequency) EOO only does a removal every 4 months or so. Regardless, the vast majority of sites don't re-add people so even if you only get scanned once it'll make a huge difference
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#83Looks interesting. What makes Optery different than several existing services that do the same thing?
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve been testing ads on Facebook, even though we don't love their privacy track record. But what Facebook and Google do with ads targeting, is very different than what the people search and data broker sites do posting and selling people’s email, phone number, IP address, home address, political party, ethnicity, etc in plain text on the web. Profitwell helps us with revenue reporting and metrics, Hotjar helps us i…
Would you consider not loading facebook and google for logged in users? I understand there is a difference but your selling privacy.
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#85Hi there, just signed up for your free service, and wow, it's creepy to see my childhood home phone number just sitting there next to my name and current address so many times. Three things: First, I'm looking at your paid plans, and what I actually want right now is just to pay $10 to have this current batch taken care of, and then I can repeat the process any time I happen to think about it. I know that's not what…
1) We do see some people activate their subscription for a few months, and then cancel their plan to downgrade back down to the Free Basic tier. The Free Basic tier sends ongoing Exposure Reports (currently every 3 months), so if they start to see more profiles pop back up, they re-activate. There are significant benefits to keeping the subscription running on an ongoing basis though. For example, we are constantly adding new data brokers, so if you keep the service running, you get covered for new data brokers automatically as we add them to your plan. Sometimes we struggle with a data broker for many months, and then get a breakthrough and are able to get a waterfall of profiles removed at that data broker. We do ongoing monitoring and scans, to find and remove your profiles if they pop back up, so they are removed immediately.
2) The Ultimate plan is our most popular plan by far. It’s not even close. Second most popular is our Core plan. And Extended is our third most popular plan. PCMag recently did a deep dive into our space and named Optery their coveted “Editors’ Choice” as the most outstanding product on the market. Here was their summary quote “Optery’s handling of the core data removal task outshines the rest, and its free tier brings privacy protection to those who can’t afford expensive subscriptions. In the realm of personal data removal, Optery is our Editors’ Choice.”
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/optery
Optery is the premium product in the space, so it’s natural that our customers would gravitate to the highest tier plan.
3) Thank you!
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone can submit opt outs, with, or without, a service like ours. The vast majority of data brokers do remove the information after an opt out request is submitted. Unfortunately, over time, many data brokers start adding it back. The CCPA (California's Privacy Law) permits a data broker to stop honoring an opt out after 12 months. To answer your question though, yes, in order to get these companies to remove your i…
The CCPA (California's Privacy Law) permits a data broker to stop honoring an opt out after 12 months. Does this mean users have to keep opting out every 12 months? If yes, that sounds...dumb, isn't it? Maybe I am not understanding this correctly, is there a reason behind this 12 month period? Even if they wanted to let data brokers add the data back, 12 months seems too short a time. What am I missing? Why is every…
My impression there was that people where pretty conscious of opt-outs and wanting to manage them carefully, if only because the consequences of not doing so could be costly. We spent a lot of time talking about opt-outs and trying to honor them across different tools they used.
Many prospects came from purchased lists. Some were contracts where some other firm was specifically handling a marketing campaign for us, but others were clearly just purchased from a data broker who, presumably, filtered their data for people who indicated an interest in us.
When we asked how to handle these, the decision was that if you showed up on one of these lists, you had opted in. After all, that is what the broker told us.
This presents the first problem: If you buy data from a broker who you have not specifically engaged to campaign on your behalf, its a little gray what that data actually represents. This may be resolved by probing into to broker's collection and segmentation more, but as far as I can tell there's not a lot of incentive for the decision makers to care.
Anyways, I was not particularly thrilled with this approach, especially after working with some lists we purchased several times a year that always had a significant number of duplicates time after time. So I wrote that particular import to check for duplicates and filter them out.
Well, this worked great until the prospects, having no recent activity, grew stale and were cleaned from the system. Then when they showed up in the list again wouldn't match and get a fresh new subscription.
Which presents the second problem: If you don't hold on to their identifiable information, you cannot determine if they have previously requested to be removed from your offerings. So it may be dumb to have to opt out again, bit the alternative is to trust them not to use your information in the mean time.
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#87Have you thought of a family plan for a family and kids all living at one address? Also niche organizational plans like police departments, law practices, therapists, hospitals, etc? Or ones for lawyers, therapists, etc to buy for themselves? I know a lot of those people just want their name only associated with their professional office addresses, never a home address, and their are rating and professional directori…
We haven't built family plans into our product yet, but in the interim, we have been providing 20% off discount codes for households of 2 to 3 people, and 25% off discount codes for households of 4 people or more. Similar applies for members of vulnerable groups and public servants. At this time a separate account needs to be created for each household member to ensure everyone is covered. This applies to both free a…
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#88Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#89Hi there, just signed up for your free service, and wow, it's creepy to see my childhood home phone number just sitting there next to my name and current address so many times. Three things: First, I'm looking at your paid plans, and what I actually want right now is just to pay $10 to have this current batch taken care of, and then I can repeat the process any time I happen to think about it. I know that's not what…
Unfortunately, your second point is just the tip of the sleaze-burg. All those sites they showed as having your information also seem to have info on "Notareal Personxxx": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30610432
That said, I did confirm your observed behavior with securely random identifiers (in the off-chance that "Notareal Personxxx" is _actually_ sufficiently commonly used for testing that it was slurped up by data brokers).
Re: Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
#90Why not provide stronger and better opt out guides like Removaly does if you're sincerely trying to help others instead of increasing conversion opportunities to pay back your VC funders?