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

Email me if you want to help out. We think there are some neat solutions enabled by GDPR.

(And thanks to Basecamp for permission to slightly denigrate the HEY logo :)

Summary: you know those irritating “prospecting” databases which sell your email address to people who want to send you spam? (Hunter.io is a good example.) We built a tool, in partnership with our friends at a great law firm, which will unsubscribe you from more than 50 of them with a single click.

Background: my inbox is besieged by cold emails from people I don’t want to hear from. Recruiters, outsource software teams, boutique investment banks I’ve never heard of… it’s a constant source of mild low-level frustration. I don’t have the time to unsubscribe from them all, and archiving is work I don’t want to do. (They also tend to not honour unsubscribe requests…) They call it “prospecting”, I call it “spam”.

After GDPR kicked in, I started replying to them with a quick keyboard macro. If I type in ‘gdprfob’, my email client inserts a properly structured GDPR subject access and deletion request. As part of the subject access request, I ask where they got my email in the first place, and what consents they sought.

More than 50% of all the cold emails I get use some sort of prospecting database, and none of them — neither the marketers nor the prospecting databases themselves — ever obtained an opt-in. Of course there’s no obligation for them to obtain my permission, as their replies always point out, but that doesn’t really excuse either the discourtesy, or the fact that “this thing we do isn’t illegal” is as unedifying as justifying bigotry with "freedom of speech derrrr!"

So we’re cutting them off at the source. We’d love to help people stop these low integrity services from buying and selling their contact details. At the very least it’ll get you out of their system, but maybe if enough people do it, they’ll do the kind, courteous thing and switch to an opt-in service which obtains consent to list your contact details for anyone to see.

How it works: give us your email address. Once you’ve verified that you control the account, we manually fill out the forms and send GDPR deletion requests where filling in the forms is not possible. At the end, we’ll send you a receipt which you can use to take up your case with the ICO in case one of the deletion requests is not honoured. We hash your email address after the final receipt is sent so that we can double check you aren’t using us to spam the spammers, but we have no access to your data and our logs are scrubbed clean. We won’t be selling your info like unroll.me did, and we’ve made sure that we can’t ever do it just in case.