Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) – Remove your personal info from the internet
Sites like Radaris, SocialCatfish, VoterRecords.com, Persopo, PeekYou, and WhitePages.com scrape the internet for the personal information of as many people as they can find, plus buy it in bulk from other sources. Then they post it online and sell it to anyone who wants to know about you. This is legal (though there are a lot of gray areas), but the net result is that a shocking amount of personal data is available about us online. Most of these sites will remove your data if you ask—but they don’t make it easy. Plus you have to ask each of them individually, and to do that, you have to know who they are in the first place.
We automate the opt-out process on these sites, first finding your exposed profiles, and then removing your information from both the public internet and the datasets they sell. Because there are hundreds of such sites, it’s impractical to manage all this on your own. Software, however, can manage it nicely. We’ve written that software.
This helps protect you from identity theft, phishing, hacking, spamming, doxing, and more. People search sites are used not only by identity thieves, but by phishers and hackers who craft convincing emails referencing non-obvious personal details as a way to build trust and trick you or those close to you into letting your guard down.
We arrived at this problem from two opposite directions. Two of us worked in the data broker industry in the past, but as we learned more about what this data actually gets used for, and the harms it can cause, we decided to leave. We had a lot of inside knowledge about how the industry worked and decided to use that knowledge to help people learn more about the problem and address it head on.
The other thing that happened was that I was a victim of identity theft. The thieves were able to open new accounts in my name by creating a fake ID and then piecing together information to bypass verification questions like “In which of the following cities have you never lived or used in your address?” or “Which of the following streets has a current or former association with you?” I found it was nearly impossible to remove myself from the Byzantine ecosystem of data brokers posting and selling his info online. Once the dust had cleared, we began discussing approaches to automating opt out and removal requests and Optery was born.
The problem is hard to solve for two reasons. First, there are so many data brokers, each with their own nuances and distinct processes for opt outs. So far we’ve built custom opt out processes for over 200 data brokers. Second, most U.S. citizens actually still have few legal rights to data privacy. Optery is only for U.S. residents for the time being, and this is one main reasons—the problem is at its worst here.
This is changing as new privacy laws are starting to get passed at the state level (e.g. in California, Nevada, and Virginia), but as of this writing the majority of U.S. citizens don’t even have a legal right to opt out of their personal information being posted and sold online, and in our experience, about 5% of data brokers simply do not comply with opt out requests. In these cases we file formal complaints to the FTC and state AG offices, and we recommend you do the same. They are slow to act on these complaints unfortunately, but at least the wheels are in motion, and we believe this issue will eventually get taken care of as more people become aware of the problem. In the meantime, we continue to send opt out requests regardless, and are able remove personal data from the other 95%.
One nuance of the opt-out process, which existing services tend not to handle correctly, is that you should avoid sending an opt out request to a data broker unless you are reasonably sure that the provider has your data in the first place. Otherwise you’re giving them information about you, when what you want is just the opposite! Some other services just take a long list of privacy@ email addresses for every data broker they can find, and then blast out generic opt out requests containing all of your identifying information, regardless of whether or not the data broker even has your information to begin with.
But the Achilles’ heel of these sites is that they rely heavily on the open web for marketing: SEO, affiliate programs, and paid search ads. Therefore they mostly support HTTP GET requests in standardized formats to reach individual people’s profiles, e.g. https://www.data-broker.com/person? firstName=george&lastName=orwell&city=new-york&state=NY.
We take advantage of this to find out which providers have you in their database first, before invoking the formal opt-out. These HTTP requests require less information than the formal opt-out processes do, plus are buried inside of the millions of other search requests that are happening through their open web marketing channels (e.g. paid search affiliate, SEO, etc). We’ve been able to find many more exposed profiles this way than the more old-fashioned approaches other services use such as manual searches and the bulk “spray and pray” emails. Also, it lets us provide our users with a dashboard full of these links they can use to discover and verify what’s out there on them. Many people prefer to submit opt out requests on their own, or are already working with a different removal service; in those cases, our dashboard can be used to double-check and verify that work. Visibility and transparency is rarely available to consumers in the world of personal data, so when we demo the product to people who care about their data privacy, it’s often a "wow" moment.
A common question we get is “And what about you? Why should I trust you to collect my data any more than these shady outfits?” To be clear, we do not sell data. We are not a data broker, and do not have any financial relationship or any affiliation with any data broker. If you are looking at an information removal service, research the company carefully. Many other services have deep ties into the data broker industry through affiliate partnerships, data sharing arrangements, and financial relationships. We do not. More on that here: https://www.optery.com/privacy-policy/. You can delete your account at any time and all information we hold about you will be destroyed.
Unfortunately, there is a catch-22 where in order to opt out of people-search sites, you must first tell them who you are (otherwise, how else would they know who to opt out!). To create an Optery account, we require only the minimum amount of information necessary for this, which is: First Name, Last Name, Year of Birth, Current City, and Current State. For most people, this is no more information than what is already publicly available online. We also offer users the option to give us more precise details (such as a full birth date rather than just birth year, past addresses, etc.) because this can increase the accuracy of locating profiles at data brokers and opt outs. This is entirely optional though. The only required info is the absolute minimum, without which there would be no point in creating an account, because we would not be able to find or remove you.
We have a freemium model. When someone creates an account, we send them a free Exposure Report with ~70 screen shots of where they’ve been found, which lets them see where their personal details are posted online and being exploited by data brokers. From there, they can decide if they’d like to use our free tools to submit opt out requests on their own self-service, or they can upgrade to a paid tier and we’ll remove the profiles for them.
We launched Optery as a Show HN last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662114) and the feedback from the community was enormously helpful. We prioritized a bunch of features like adding MFA, expanding our list of data brokers, streamlining UX, and clarifying our privacy terms and practices, all based on feedback from our Show HN. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the current iteration!
[+] [-] setgree|4 years ago|reply
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 you want as a business, and I'm sure it's not what your backers want, but I can't see why a monthly subscription service is the right model from a user's POV. All I really want is to periodically wipe the slate clean.
Second, I see that you have the most expensive plan labeled as "MOST POPULAR," and I'm afraid I just don't believe that that's true; and given how much your business relies on trust, something about the breeziness/sleaziness of this tactic seems out of place.
And third, a general comment -- this seems like a cool idea for a company, But I'm surprised YC was interested in it. I personally can't see any way that this becomes a billion dollar business, or 100 billion, or whatever returns VCs are looking for. But heck, if I was able to guess that kind of thing, I'd be out there doing it.
Good luck y'all
[+] [-] istjohn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] cacarbonate|4 years ago|reply
easyoptouts is the closest thing I know of to what you're after. It's still a subscription at $20 p.a., not $10, but you can sign up and then cancel after initial opt outs.
[+] [-] thoraway77f|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|4 years ago|reply
You're telling me that to remove my info I have to essentially give (through your service) all these companies & data brokers my info so they can opt me out, and actually trust them that they'll do so? If anything, opting out is a signal that you may actually be of more interest to them than not doing anything. If these companies can also infer that the request is coming from your service (and they will, unless you use random proxies and browser automation), the flag becomes "this person has enough disposable money to pay for such a service" which suddenly increases the value of your profile by orders of magnitude.
How are you going to make money to justify the VC funding? VCs rarely fund boring, sustainable businesses that sell a service and make a slim profit; for them it's all about hypergrowth, but I don't see the potential here - unless of course you start doing the very thing you're currently protecting against. The simple fact that it's VC-funded tells me to steer well clear.
The only proper way to deal with this is with GDPR-like regulation and actually enforcing it - the latter has been lacking in Europe, but thankfully seems like it's somewhat picked up recently.
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
To answer your question though, yes, in order to get these companies to remove your info, you have to submit an opt out that identifies who you are. There is a catch-22, otherwise, they would not know who to opt out.
There are a multitude of reasons why people submit opt outs beyond whether or not the person can pay, e.g. victims of domestic violence, police officers, public figures, government officials, members of the military, etc. The data brokers are aware of this and generally have processes to accommodate the requests.
Millions of people use some form of identity protection to protect themselves from identity theft, email spam, phishing, scams, hacking, etc. It is a multi-billion dollar market across the consumer, business, and government levels.
I do agree that we need stronger privacy laws in the U.S. ASAP!
[+] [-] troydavis|4 years ago|reply
Other people raised that concern when this appeared on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=27668140), and at the time, that’s indeed what the service did.
Even if one ignores intentional misuse, simple incompetence by a data broker seems like enough to cause a problem. It only takes one data broker to commingle fields from opt-out requests with existing data (and then share/sell/trade that existing data) for the opt-out fields to spread.
[+] [-] striking|4 years ago|reply
Happy user of Optery here: you don't have to give Optery a whole lot of info. No SSNs or anything, just things they would search by to help you remove them. Are there fields for past addresses or people you lived with or past names you may have had? Sure. Do you have to fill them out? No. Are they provided in bulk to the data brokers? No.
[+] [-] mderazon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw10920|4 years ago|reply
How can you index into a hashmap, an array, or a DB table without a key? Answer: you cannot.
There's no way for data-broker opt-outs to work without uniquely identifying the individual who wishes to be removed.
Sure, I agree that "GDPR-like regulation and actually enforcing it" is the proper solution - but how long will that take? Five years? Ten?
What if I want my personal data removed from these brokers now?
Edit: now that I think about it - you could build some scheme where you give the data-brokers a cryptographic hash of some personally-identifying information, so if they don't already have you in their database, then they can't get your information. But, in order to do that, you'd need regulation equivalent to the GDPR (otherwise they'd never do it), in which case the above argument still applied.
[+] [-] Farfromthehood|4 years ago|reply
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 under my name. I was surprised+ pissed, but optery has manager to remove most of them. They send a quarterly(?) PDF update containing before and after screenshots of days brokers where my info was once displayed.
I still perform my monthly searches and report any findings to optery. They've been receptive and apologetic whenever I find my info online.
That's my review. Ask questions if you want.
[+] [-] istjohn|4 years ago|reply
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 Personxxxx, Detroit, MI,
<Yes, that's me> <No, I'm not there>
See screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/Z2M8y3d
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] benrapscallion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
The pricing tiers have to do with how difficult it is to remove consumers from that data broker. Some of the most well-known brokers are also the most difficult to opt out, which is why they’re in the highest priced tier.
Thanks so much for your feedback and for using Optery.
[+] [-] EnergyCrush|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonthepirate|4 years ago|reply
Even in 2006, the problem was the same and the solution seems roughly the same.
Reputation Defender rebranded a few times. I don't think they have this feature anymore. Might be worth asking them why they got rid of it, if that's what they did do.
Working there on the tool, I always felt like it was pointless because it's an unsolvable problem and scrubbing your info from a few hundred of the top data collection sites wouldn't SOLVE the problem... it just makes it a tiny bit less terrible but the effectiveness is not measurable. I think the TLDR is that people want solutions to things and programmatically unsubscribing only "works" in well lit neighborhoods and those too often aren't the causes of consumer pain.
Trying to solve the problem by deleting records is sort of like contract tracing coronavirus. Efforts to solve the problem by stomping it out wasn't viable and we now know we just need to learn to live with it in the endemic phase.
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
This has led data brokers to taking opt out requests much more seriously, with most of them investing in real technical infrastructure to handle and process opt outs successfully. Until the CCPA was passed, there was not even a standard requirement for a data broker to even have an opt out page.
Today, if you Google the name of someone using a data removal service like Optery, versus the name of someone that does not, you will see a night and day difference in the number of listings in Google from data brokers. Without Optery, you’ll find dozens of data broker listings with current and past home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, age, family members names, etc. With Optery, that information will be almost impossible to find making bad actors much more likely to move on to the next person who has not taken steps to protect their privacy.
[+] [-] jamal-kumar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culi|4 years ago|reply
https://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
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] consumer451|4 years ago|reply
Is there a service which will remove medical debt which is beyond the statute of limitations?
This is a simple process to do manually. I have done it myself.
Look up my credit report, find old[0] medical debt, find the originating state's statute of limitations on medical debt, dispute the charge citing the appropriate statute.
Poof, medical debt gone. Credit improved.
This is so simple, unless regulations prevent this service, it must already exist, correct?
[0] Meaning of "old" varies by US State. CA=4yrs, FL=5yrs
[+] [-] nocommandline|4 years ago|reply
2) How do you handle making sure that you are not 'adding' more information to a data broker who already has information about you? For example, a friend of mine once found his information publicly available on a website on the internet. To remove his information from being publicly displayed, the website required him to provide a phone number where he would receive a confirmation text code that he had to add to the removal request form. This essentially means the website now has more information (another phone #) about him.
3) Some of the information these websites display are gathered from public government databases like court records, county registrations of house sales, etc. I would assume those records can't be 'removed' or 'hidden'. Do you have a specific way of dealing with such?
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
1) It really depends on the data broker and the state you live in, but the majority are the latter (prevent the info from being displayed online). When possible we request full deletion, but California residents are really the only ones that have firm data deletion rights from the CCPA and are typically the only ones that data deletion is even made available as an option by the data brokers. We have some new product features in development that will increase our ability to deliver data deletions though in the future.
Regarding “If the latter, then this is only half a solution because the data broker can still sell your information”: this too is inconsistent. In most cases they will stop selling your information after the opt out, but in some cases, though they take the profile down from the public web, but may still be selling the data behind the scenes, usually to corporate buyers.
When the data is represented as deleted by the data broker, we don’t have a good way to confirm that it has actually been deleted unfortunately. We have some ideas though for how to do this in the future.
2) We recommend only submitting the minimum amount of information necessary to complete the opt out, which in most cases is the minimum amount of information required to sign up for Optery (first name, last name, year of birth, current city, current state), or sometimes also the URL where your profile was found. Many data brokers request a phone number to verify, but we recommend never providing them with your real phone number. Most of the time, demanding the data broker remove the profile and threatening legal action or reporting them to the FTC and your state attorney general's office over email will induce them to remove the profile without a phone number. If data brokers push back on this, we recommend you definitely file a complaint with the FTC and your state attorney general (we do this frequently). If you do feel you want to provide a phone number, we recommend creating a temporary, secondary, or disposable phone number. If you do opt outs on your own, we also recommend you always use a temporary or secondary email address for the submissions, and NEVER use your primary email address. We have a post on our Help Desk about this here:
https://help.optery.com/en/article/do-not-share-your-persona...
3) Definitely there are some data sets that are inherently difficult or nearly impossible to remove, e.g. public records, voter records, etc. However, we can often get this type of data removed from the for-profit web sites that re-publish it. The best best thing you can do is submit the opt out request. Some will honor it, and some will not. It’s hit or miss. The silver lining is that most of the web sites that re-publish public records usually publish more limited information as opposed to other sites that post things like phone number, email address, ethnicity, household income, network, family members' names, etc.
[+] [-] wrongnameta|4 years ago|reply
Even if it somehow existed, to see it with the same first and middle name and location just seems way too much of a coincidence. Do any of these brokers really have my info or are you just showing this false information to help increase conversions?
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
So just because you see a data broker in your dashboard, does not mean we are implying that your profile is there. In fact, if you click on any of the links, you’ll see we spawn a modal that says “External links help with self-service opt outs and provide visibility into where your info is posted online, but are not always perfect.”
My guess is that if you click through any of the links, it will lead to pages that say something like “profile not found” because it’s a name that does not exisit.
We also have an article on our Help Desk that explains what’s happening, and further below is a snippet that most likely explains what you are experiencing:
https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-leads-to-a...
“What is often confusing is that we display the “View” links for every data broker, regardless of whether we find your profile at the data broker or not. The "View" links are not intended to be perfect matches for your profile. Results will vary for each user, depending on your circumstances. Sometimes the "View" links are not perfect, and other people may be listed, or you might not be there at all, but in most cases, they allow you to quickly view a snapshot of where your personal details are exposed online.”
This question has come up before, so we really need to do a better job of ironing out the confusion in the product. Thanks so much for the feedback.
[+] [-] teeceetime2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novok|4 years ago|reply
Also people trying it out might give fake names to start, you should let people be able to change their name in settings vs. making it uneditable after signup.
Also another things is email & email domain privacy. Some nerds & organizations have an entire domain as their email set that they don't want in directories, marketing spam lists, etc either, kind of like https://haveibeenpwned.com/
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
We don’t cover the professional ratings sites and directories that people tend to cultivate presences on consciously. We are 100% focused on stopping the unwanted posting and selling of personal information by data brokers. The full list of sites we cover can be found here: https://www.optery.com/pricing/#data-brokers-we-cover
If someone signs up for Optery using a fake name, they almost certainly will get garbage results. The Exposure Report will most likely be empty, and the data broker links will most likely lead to “profile not found pages” or incorrect profiles (garbage in, garbage out). One thing to clarify is that we list out each data broker we cover, regardless of whether your profile was found or not. We do this partly to support our Free Basic users that use the data broker links in the dashboard to QA and verify their own opt out work (or the opt out work of other services). However, based on yours and others comments here, this is definitely confusing peoples, so we need to fix this and make it more clear. Thank you so much for this great feedback.
To prevent abuse, to change the name on your account, you’ll need to reach out to our customer support. We have more info on this on the Optery Help Desk here:
https://help.optery.com/en/article/how-can-i-edit-my-name-1t...
You’re welcome to use any email you want when you sign up for Optery. Email is not a primary key for us when submitting opt outs. We do not use the private email address you use when you sign up with Optery to submit opt outs. Optery creates our own private emails for you that we manage behind the scenes when submitting the opt outs.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
The real solutions are one or both of either make privacy a broader public priority than transparency, which is unlikely to happen, or stop making facts about yourself that are part of the public record an authentication mechanism.
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
And there are some data sets that are inherently difficult to remove, e.g. public records, voter records, etc (as you pointed out). However, we often can get this type of data removed from the for-profit web sites that re-publish it and market it online. And we do remove the vast majority of information that's out there on individuals, dramatically reducing your surface area for discovery and attack. For example, many of the web sites that re-publish public records, usually only publish very limited amount of information, and lead to other sites that have much richer and more sensitive information like phone number, email address, age, home address, family members' names, etc.
Its very difficult to get everything removed, but if you can get rid of 99% of it, you can maintain a much lower profile and make it that much more difficult for someone that's trying to act against you. If a bad actor is just looking for a victim, they're more likely to move on to the next person that has done nothing to protect themselves.
Also, having a low profile might be a signal to bad actors that you take your privacy and security seriously, you have good security hygiene, and are likely to have other security mechanisms in place to protect you, and make their task more difficult, like identity theft protection, a home security system, a VPN, or even Multi-factor Authentication.
[+] [-] opteryqthrow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|4 years ago|reply
https://www.judyrecords.com/
[+] [-] billyhoffman|4 years ago|reply
How many fewer spam and phishing attempts do your customers receive vs non-customers? What is the rate of successful identity theft against your users vs a similarly technical and privacy conscience control group?
I love this idea, but you’re asking me to spend more money a month than many streaming services. To command that type of price you’re going to need to show actual data on risk reduction and not hand wave some claims about spam and phishing. So I wonder who your target customer is? For a higher profile person spending $300 a year to automate some opsec is trivial. For broader consumers perhaps less so, especially without hard data on efficacy.
Can you point to quantifiable effects of your service?
[+] [-] Melatonic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hld|4 years ago|reply
As a EU citizen who spent weeks sending GDPR requests back and worth with several data brokers I know just what a pain it is to get some data deleted. Even if it was only "trivial" stuff like things I have shopped for online (I always requested the data they had before requesting that they delete it) it was a laborious process.
I have two questions for you guys:
1) As a EU citizen do I benefit from signing up to your site or are the data brokers you are targeting focused on US citizens?
2) Why the monthly recurring fee? I would gladly make a higher one off payment every now and then for the removal of my data. Or is it monthly because you are keeping track if any of my data shows up at some point and then immediately remove it?
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
To answer your question - NO - there is no benefit to signing up for Optery if you do not have a presence in the U.S. The only benefit would be that we will notify you in the future when we begin offering our service in your country. This sentence is buried in the post above "Optery is only for U.S. residents for the time being, and this is one main reasons—the problem is at its worst here."
The reasons the service is charged on an ongoing recurring fee are:
1) We are constantly adding new data brokers, so if you keep the service running, you get covered for new data brokers as we add them to your plan.
2) We do ongoing monitoring and scans, to find and remove your profiles if they pop back up. 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. After opting out, many data brokers actually display a message apologizing in advance admitting that sometimes their opt out records are over-written by accident which might cause your data to reappear.
[+] [-] STU-UTF|4 years ago|reply
Why 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?
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
https://www.optery.com/opt-out-guides/
To compare Removaly and Optery, the best thing to do is to sign up for each company’s free scan and compare the results. The quality of a data removal company’s free scan is a good indicator of the quality of its opt outs. A lot of the companies in the space have incredible marketing that creates high hopes, but their products are ineffective. The quality of the free scan is usually a tip off if the service is going to be a winner or a let-down before you turn over your credit card. Optery’s free scans produce an average of 70+ results per person (sometimes over 100+ results). I’m not aware of Removaly or any other company coming anywhere close to that number.
[+] [-] jamal-kumar|4 years ago|reply
The amount of OSINT available on americans is like 2-3$ to access and on each search I can see stuff in your family history even which is just incredibly crazy. Doesn't work on people from other countries.
Food for thought.
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emptysongglass|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] jrockway|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] estaseuropano|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cacarbonate|4 years ago|reply
1. Check out the IntelTechniques workbook. You can a lot of this yourself for free. https://inteltechniques.com/workbook.html
2. If you want to hire someone, there are a bunch of similar options. This list was put together by a competitor, easyoptouts, but it seems pretty neutral: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M1YXTKmfs6rVDJHQVO3V...
And a question for Optery: I tried your service but it mainly found people who aren't me. Are you working on improving identification?
[+] [-] beyondd|4 years ago|reply
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...