[ds]

The big thing to know is the following:

Google yourself - See what shows up that shouldnt. Go through those sites and manually opt out. Its not too hard and you get the biggest offenders.

Yes, you can use a automated service to do this for you but I think its a really bad idea based on how most of them work.

First of all- Most of the big ones make use of extensive labor in thie phillipines and malaysia to manually type your data into opt out forms. They also have to make use of extensive proxy networks that I can only suspect are not always on the up and up. This is because the databrokers will block IP's from submitting more than a few opt outs per date. So you are supporting both shady practices for the proxys and third world labor thats semi exploited

Second of all- You are trusting yet another company with your data. When you sign up to one of these services, they obviously know everything about you. When one of these services inevitably has a data breach in the future, its going to be a disaster.

The reason that the big services have difficult with the biggest services that are listed in this article is because they: Use captchas, use cloudflare and do email confirmations. They also do things where they show you multiple pieces of data and you have to pick which one is yours, but some of the data is blurred and presented as a image. ( ie- Is this email yours? tee***@gmail.com )

So, what to do if you want to stay on this? Well- Im creating a solution with my team to do what all the big players should have done- Do the optouts from your own device. They of course want you to do it from their servers because its a nice zero friction experience where you just type your info in and they handle most stuff. But as we see, the biggest offenders for databrokers are NOT handled because they are tricky.

So, at our startup https://redact.dev we already built out a ton of tech for this, but targeting social media and messengers. We are now building all of that out for data brokers. And because its ran directly on your own machine there are a TON of advantages:

1: No limit to how often you can scan for new databroker leaks. Most of the players now limit you to once every 30-45 days

2: No limit to adding friends/family to scan/opt them out also.

3: No use of third partys to process your removals. This one is self explanatory. The deletions happen direclty between your device and the databroker- no third world workers involved.

4: Handles the 'hard to delete from' sites listed in the article. Our built in IMAP system can handle email confirmations no problem. Because its running from your own IP, you have no issues with getting blocked there either. Cloudflare/captchas are also no issue

5: Most importantly, you dont have to trust another company with your most personal information. All your data like address/names/phone stay on your device and are only sent to the sites you need to opt out from. Believe it or not, a bunch of these databroker remover sites will just bulk email a bunch of databrokers right now saying "hey, if joe smith @ 123 main street is in your DB, remove him!"

The big drawback is that you need to have a device open that can do the work for you. With other services you can just pay and shut off your PC or phone. You need to keep our solution open for 5 minutes while it does its work. I think thats a definitely good tradeoff for the security you get AND the fact that it instantly removes you from many of these sites. Alot of the players as I mentioned just do emails so it could take weeks or months before they remove you. If you use the databroker sites automated forms, it can be removed instantly or within days or hours.

[pc86]

I mean doing something yourself is often preferable to using a third party especially where privacy is concerned, but this isn't slave labor at slave wages we're talking about here. What job do you think these people would have if they weren't sitting in an office typing PII into computers all day? They wouldn't suddenly be getting six figure remote programming jobs. They'd be doing the same thing for some other company, or they'd be doing something worse. Third world labor is not exploited because it's in the third world and makes less in an absolute sense than other areas.

Edit: Ah you edited while I was replying, yeah it makes sense that you're selling something, hence the mischaracterization.

[ds]

I am not OK with supporting someone getting paid 2-3 dollars a day for this labor and would prefer to not support that business model if I can.

I also dont trust those workers not to misuse or sell my information on the side because of the unfortunate financial situation they are in financially.

Its acutally a similar answer for why I dont pirate games or software. I dont want to support the behavior and I dont trust that something bad wont happen as a result (virus/malware/etc.)