31–40 of 40 posts
I would pay three figures for someone to do this for me, for all these brokers. (I'm well aware that outsourcing the job carries its own risks... nonetheless there's an opportunity here.)
Kanary is here and actively posting if that helps at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37222672
https://netzpolitik.org/2023/eu-country-comparison-how-data-...
Optery founder here, we're a YC company (W22) that automatically scans and removes people from hundreds of these sites. (for U.S. residents only) 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…
Most sites a either down or blocked me :(
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'.
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Afaict, these are all recurring subscriptions. Is there any reason not to signup for a month or two and then cancel, maybe repeat every couple years? The sub is more of a continuous monitoring thing? I assume they wouldn't just "undo" their opt-outs? I'd prefer a one-time payment over that darn subscription-recurring-revenue-model.
The month or two thing will work for some exposures, but the bummer reality is that these sites are terrible and the worst of them take persistence and escalation to remove, which can take some time. (I've been working for one of the aforementioned—Kanary—for about a year now on this sort of thing.) Re: undoing opt-outs, we do not do that, but data brokers will re-surface your information again if they find it elsewh…
Out of curiosity I tried a few of the services on this list. They all follow the same textbook dark pattern, with fake progress bars, making the process of looking up someone artificially take several minutes, then only at the end do they ask for your email and payment information.
There's a few actually free sites that give you most of the info that the others charge you for. All the good ones I'm aware of are listed here. Free, no signup, instant search results. 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 eve…
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This! Plus some forms require an ID and I'm not trusting those people with that kind of documents
Which is extra annoying, because they shouldn't , but it's somewhat vague. 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…
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Kanary is here and actively posting if that helps at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37222672
hello!
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hello!
Any idea on how to remove records on Intelius where the email is not yours but the rest of the data is accurate? I just subscribed to Kanary few days ago, great service!
To get past this, create a burner email (gmail or duckduckgo or mozilla or hey or icloud) that looks at least a little bit human, send a very angry sounding email to privacy@intelius.com and cc privacy@peopleconnect.us (the company that owns intelius, zabasearch, uspeoplesearch... and a few other spam sites).
Tell them you tried to use their form and it's broken and not showing correct info. You may need to verify your bday or past addresses in an email exchange, but once you do this with 2 or 3 emails, they'll suppress your info from public search. DO NOT send them government ID, even if they ask for it, insist you've already provided enough verification.
Include if you're a Californian / Colorado / EU / Iowa / Utah / Connecticut resident, or if you've had any harassment / stalking issues in the past. (this context provides you with legal leverage if they don't comply with your request - so including it helps you get a faster response)
If they give you anymore trouble beyond that, reach out to our team hello [at] kanary.com. We'll help you escalate the issue.