Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet

Optery is only for U.S. residents at this time. Sorry, this statement is buried in the middle of the original post so some people did not see it.

If you go to the sign up page, after you select your country, we again warn non-U.S. residents of this before they submit their information. The only benefit to signing up if you are from a non-U.S. country is we will notify you when we begin supporting your country.

If you are a dual citizen, just select your primary city and state in the U.S. There's no functionality to support non-U.S. citizens at this time.

Thank you for trying out Optery!

At this price I believe Optery still provides more value than easyoptouts. For $9.99, half the price of easyoptouts, you could let Optery’s opt out bot run for 30 days on 100+ data brokers and then cancel the plan before the next monthly payment is due. For $24.99, about the same price as easyoptouts, you could let Optery’s opt out bot run for 30 days on 200+ data brokers and then cancel the plan before the next monthly payment is due.

By cancelling the plan, you wouldn’t benefit from the ongoing scanning, monitoring, and removals from companies that take longer than 30 days, or the coverage for the new data brokers continually being added to the plans. But Optery’s Free Basic plan provides free quarterly scans and reports, so you could always turn it back on based on what the reports are saying.

Optery covers 200+ data brokers, whereas Removaly only covers 51 data brokers per their web site. Optery’s average scan results find 70+ profiles exposed and often top 100+ profiles exposed (scans are free by the way). Removaly is more comparable to Abine’s DeleteMe service whose “Sites We Remove From” page states they only cover 38 data brokers.

In world where Optery is finding 70 – 100 exposed profiles on a first scan, what use is a service like Removaly or DeleteMe that only officially cover 40 – 50?

Optery’s Ultimate plan also offers something called “Custom Removals”, which means if you find a profile the Ultimate plan does not cover, you can submit it and Optery will make a best effort to remove it: https://help.optery.com/en/article/ultimate-plan-offers-best...

Regarding easyoptouts, if you’re really price sensitive and looking for a super cheap option, just upgrade your Optery plan for 1 month. Let Optery’s opt out bot run for 30 days on 200+ data brokers and then cancel the plan before the next monthly payment is due. By cancelling the plan, you won’t benefit from the ongoing coverage and the new data brokers continually being added to the plans, but Optery’s Free Basic plan provides free quarterly scans and reports, so you could always turn it back on based on what your exposure reports are saying.

When a user signs up for Optery, the scanning / matching technology finds 70+ matched profiles at data brokers on average with a typical range from 50 to 100. You’ll find these results in your Exposure Report after the scan completes, typically within 1 hour from sign up. False positives in the Optery Exposure Reports are rare, but do happen sometimes. The most common reasons for false positives are:

1) The user either intentionally or accidentally inputs incorrect data when they signed up. For example, today we had a customer complain about false positives, and then when we looked into it, it turned out he had accidentally input his birth year incorrectly when signing up.

2) The user has a common name and lives in a big city. Optery looks at lots of data before its confident in the match, but false positives can slip through for example when there are multiple people named John Robert Smith, age 38, living in New York City.

The best way to reduce false positives, and the accuracy of Optery’s scans in general, is to add more information to your profile beyond the minimum required to sign up (e.g. middle name, past cities and states you’ve lived in, etc). This helps with our matching algorithms.

If what you’re referring to are the "View" links to data brokers in your dashboard, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the “View” links have limitations. After the comments here, we made a few quick cosmetic updates to reduce the confusion (the updates are described elsewhere in the comments) and we have several changes planned to make the dashboard more intuitive. More info on what’s going on is here:

https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-link-leads...

Sorry. This was stated in the original post text above, but clearly many people did not see it. We do warn people before they submit any information. Many apologies.