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Optery isn't designed for this. There are probably some "reputation management" companies out there that handle this situation. I've heard they can be in the $1,000/mo range in cost, but I don't know for sure as that's not our expertise. If you have an official government document or statement that provides evidence of the expungement / seal, I'd recommend contacting the sites directly over email and sending them the evidence, and I would expect that most of them would remove the information without too much trouble.

Great questions!

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.

Thanks for trying it out. One thing to clarify is that we list out each data broker we cover, regardless of whether or not 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).

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.

We hate to hear that you had a bad experience with our customer support since we take it very seriously and spend a large amount of time on it. We love feedback and respond to all inquiries, so please don’t hesitate to tell us how we can improve either here or through our standard support channel, and we will definitely act on it: https://help.optery.com/

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.

We’ve been testing ads on Facebook, even though we don't love their privacy track record. But what Facebook and Google do with ads targeting, is very different than what the people search and data broker sites do posting and selling people’s email, phone number, IP address, home address, political party, ethnicity, etc in plain text on the web.

Profitwell helps us with revenue reporting and metrics, Hotjar helps us improve our user experience, and Google Tag Manager makes the delivery of these vendor’s tags a little easier.

We disclose the third party vendors we use here: https://www.optery.com/how-we-secure-your-data/

Optery does compete with DeleteMe. There's some info on how Optery is different than DeleteMe here:

https://www.optery.com/introducing-optery-remove-yourself-fr...

PCMag also compared Optery and DeleteMe in their review here:

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/optery

To take your first point one further, services like ours don't do anything to remove people's info from the dark web. Indeed, no one can, that's the entire premise of the dark web.

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.

That's certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that if you do nothing, you information will continue to persist, multiply, and propagate unchecked. Those that take the time (or money) to remove the profiles, have dramatically reduced online footprints, which is why these types of services are becoming more and more popular. Many companies are starting to mandate their employees use services like ours to strengthen their security posture to reduce exposure to phishing, hacking, email spam, etc.

We do see people activate the 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, so if they start to see more profiles pop back up, they re-activate. Others activate the subscription for a few months, then cancel, and then completely delete their account, and we destroy all info we have about the user at that point.

Great to hear you are fighting the good fight to protect your data!

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.

Anyone can submit opt outs, with, or without, a service like ours. The vast majority of data brokers do remove the information after an opt out request is submitted. 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.

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!

We have a page up on our Help Desk referencing data brokers that ignore opt out requests (the 5% mentioned in the post above). We refer to these data brokers as "Dishonorable Data Brokers". BlockShopper is one of them.

We prefer not to give Dishonorable Data Brokers a free pass, and continue to pursue multiple channels to have our customers' profiles removed from these data brokers, even if they are currently "Dishonorable" and do not honor opt outs, like BlockShopper.

We have seen cases in the past where through persistence, dishonorable data brokers eventually start honoring opt out requests. Below is the Help Desk post with more info on this topic:

https://help.optery.com/en/article/coverage-limitations-for-...

2FA is live now for Optery - here's the help page for setting it up:

https://help.optery.com/en/article/how-to-add-multi-factor-a...

I mentioned a free service posted here recently in another comment (pasted again below) – was this it?

The top comment in another data privacy Show HN shared recently illustrates the gap our tool fills: "Does it take into account whether or not a given data broker currently has my data? Since the deletion requests contain my personal info (for some, a fair amount of it), I'd rather not have that sent to 500 brokers if only 10 or 20 of them actually have me in their database." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27146828)

If you sign up for a free account, you will get a free Exposure Report that is usually very eye opening. Most people’s jaws drop when they see how exposed they are. Highly recommended!

Thank you for your thoughtful and encouraging words. Each of your suggestions is on our roadmap.

After adding Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which is nearly complete and will be released soon, our second most popular feature request is to add a family plan. This is high on our list and we plan to offer a solution for this in the coming months.

Thank you for the kind words and for checking out Optery!

We are an Authorized Agent working on behalf of our customers. You can learn more in our Terms of Service here: https://www.optery.com/terms-of-service/

As has been mentioned elsewhere here, how exactly would it work otherwise? i.e. how do you suggest someone opts out of a data broker, without providing PII?

Opting out presents a catch-22 where in order to opt out, you have to tell them who you are, i.e. provide PII.

If you have a method for opting out of people search data brokers without providing PII, I’d love to hear how that works.

The data broker sites sell information about consumers, that’s primarily how they make their money. It is true that some data broker sites will attempt to charge you for removing your information, but everyone can make these removal requests for free, so paying them is not necessary (and highly discouraged!)

To reiterate what I’ve mentioned a few times on this page: We are not a data broker. We do not sell data. We do not publish data. We do not have any financial relationship with any data broker. We are not affiliated with any data broker. Per our Privacy Policy: “We don’t sell or rent your personal information to any third parties for any purpose. You are the only owner of your Personal Data and can request disclosure or deletion at any time.” https://www.optery.com/privacy-policy/

We are a third party service, un-affiliated with any data broker, providing visibility to consumers for free on what private information data brokers are posting about them online. We then have free do-it-yourself tools consumers can use to submit opt outs themselves, or paid plans where we submit the opt outs for our customers.

There are misconceptions, and one of them is about what happens if a customer subsequently cancels our service. If that happens, over time, data brokers may start adding you back. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (the most strict privacy law in the U.S.) actually permits data brokers to stop honoring an opt out request after 1 year. Some data brokers honor opt outs indefinitely, but others require annual effort to ensure your name and personal info stays removed. However, under no circumstance will Optery ever re-send information to any data brokers for any kind of re-population effort. The only information we send to data brokers are opt out requests.

Per our Privacy Policy: “We don’t sell or rent your personal information to any third parties for any purpose. You are the only owner of your Personal Data and can request disclosure or deletion at any time.”

Also included in our Privacy Policy, as is standard terms in most privacy policies: “If we are involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, your Personal Data may be transferred.”

You can learn more from our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service here: https://www.optery.com/privacy-policy/ https://www.optery.com/terms-of-service/

Yes - Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) is in development – this is almost ready and will be released soon.

No server errors have been reported like what you’ve experienced at other services. A few people received an error trying to log in without completing the second step in the signup process, but we resolved this immediately and now prevent people from logging in without completing the two-step registration.

Regarding your last comment, for our customers we deliver Removals Status Updates indicating the number of removals that have been completed, are pending, or are in process. The Removals Status Updates are configurable in account settings for delivery weekly, monthly (default), or never. The dashboard also has up-to-date status indicators for removals pending, in progress, not found, etc. Additionally, for our paying customers, we send Removals Reports approximately quarterly summarizing visually all the places customers have been removed and/or cannot be found.

You have a brand new account with no comment history other than this post, yet you’ve taken the time to host screen shots and write multiple disparaging comments with baseless accusations to this post.

It sounds like you’re either having a difficult time understanding how our product works, or your motivations are insincere.

If your concerns are sincere, please feel free to create a ticket in our help desk and we would be happy to setup a personal demo for you to show you how our product works and address your concerns.

https://help.optery.com

The number “168” you referenced reflects the number of data brokers we cover, not the total number of times you’ve been “found”. I can see how this would be confusing though, so it is a good reminder to us that we need to implement better tool tips to make this more clear.

In the screenshots you shared, see where it says “Your Exposure Risk Scan is in Progress”, with the green hourglass icon below it? That means your scan has not been completed yet, so actually we do not claim to have found you anywhere yet.

If you input a fake name (as you mentioned), you will of course get bogus results. When you click through the links after inputting a fake name, you should expect to see 404 pages or “Not found” pages at the data brokers as you described. This is because of course the data broker cannot find the fake name you entered. I also can see how this may be confusing, so another reminder to us that we need to do a better job of implementing tool tips to make this more clear.

Even if you input a real name, the “View” links will not always generate results. Here’s a quote from our Getting Started page where we explain how this works:

“Sometimes these 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. The quality of our results sometimes varies, for example, if you have a common name like “John Smith” or “Mary Smith”, it might be difficult to find your profiles among many others with the same name. Adding a middle name or a full birthdate to your Optery profile often helps. Keep in mind, we are constantly improving our platform, and we have a lot of things in the works to improve these results.”

Link to full page here: https://www.optery.com/getting-started/

There are two steps in the signup process. Step 1 is for basic email and password. Step 2 is for the bare minimum information necessary to find your profiles at data brokers.

We found when people skipped step 2 and then logged in, they would get this error. We fixed the bug and have made step 2 required.

Here's more info: https://help.optery.com/en/article/why-does-optery-need-so-m...

Optery is U.S. only at this time

I responded to this question on this page under a different sub-thread

I responded to this question on this page under a different sub-thread

If you click through the original Show HN posted link at the very top of the page, there's a section on the Introducing Optery page titled "How Is Optery Different From Competitors?" with differentiators from OneRep, DeleteMe, PrivacyDuck, and PrivacyBot there.

If you already have a OneRep subscription (or any other competitor opt out / removals service), you can sign up for Optery for free, and use the Free Basic account results to keep them honest and check their work.

In our experience, we typically find 20 - 40 profiles other services have missed and left exposed.

If you click through the original Show HN posted link at the very top of the page, there's a section on the Introducing Optery page titled "How Is Optery Different From Competitors?" with differentiators from DeleteMe, OneRep, PrivacyDuck, and PrivacyBot there.

If you already have a DeleteMe subscription (or any other competitor opt out / removals service), you can sign up for Optery for free, and use the Free Basic account results to keep them honest and check their work.

In our experience, we typically find 20 - 40 profiles DeleteMe has missed and left exposed. If you do this, please send us a message and let us know what you find.

I responded to this question on this page under a different sub-thread