Dan GoodinMy Ars colleague @kevinpurdy did a great job covering research by @yaelwrites, Victoria Kauffman and @leigh finding that fee-based services promising to remove your data from people-search sites are grossly inferior to manually opting out.
Leigh Honeywell@dangoodin @kevinpurdy @yaelwrites fwiw, I want to gently disagree with this framing of the results – I think there’s still a lot of value in these services in terms of time saving and not having to figure out how to deal with the people search sites. Obviously there’s a different value level between the best vs the rest, but although they are imperfect and incomplete, they will still save users some time doing opt outs. Though some degree of manual work remains necessary no matter which one you use.
The research also doesn’t call out the additional scope that some services cover - in particular I want to give kudos to Kanary which surfaces more than just data broker content AND has some security guidance as well.
Fundamentally, though, these are all imperfect band-aids that don’t replace good regulations. Americans deserve better privacy protection at a systemic level.
My camera shoots fascists@dangoodin @kevinpurdy @yaelwrites @leigh
After reading this, I think I'm going to give Easy Opt Outs a try. Besides being vastly cheaper than DeleteMe, what clinched it is that DeleteMe's site is full of ad trackers but Easy Opt Out has none.
I've written DeleteMe to ask them about this a couple times and never received a response. I will be sure to let them know why I switched.
Troubled Clef Studios@Mikal @dangoodin @kevinpurdy @yaelwrites @leigh Thanks for the suggestion here. I just became an Easy Opt Outs customer.