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by ds 986 days ago
Is this a whitelabeled version of saymine? Seems like the same type of service.

For what its worth, I think you need to go much farther than this. Saying "delete my account" does not do what you think it does for the vast majority of services.

For instaince, take reddit or discord. When you 'delete your account' it does not actually delete your data. It just removes your email and changes your account handle to 'deleted' - but all of the messages you sent are still there, able to be read and recalled by anyone you have interacted with.

This is a big reason I created https://redact.dev back in the day- I wanted to full delete my skype account because I didnt use it anymore. But when I went through the process, I found out (at the time) that it could simply be reactivated at any time by anyone who got the password. On top of that, all the messages I have ever sent will also be available for whoever logs in. So literally the only solution to actually delete your messages is to one by one go in and individually delete every message.

Also, to be clear- Most of these data broker removal services these days are making use of a mechanic where they simply email a request on your behalf to be removed. I am seeing first hand that more and more data brokers are refusing to honor these requests because they feel legally they are covered by making a 'opt out' page available to the end user. The rise in 'data broker removal' companies has no doubt accelerated that as well.

The best solution is to not go the email route, but to use the automated removal forms. Of course, these guys cant automate that so they dont do it.

1 comments

I tried Optery (YC 22W) from an HN announcement and thought it would let me see data associations based on my email/handles from across the web and what data brokers are doing with it but the way the system, as in dealing with Data Brokers through some freedom of information as a service like Optery, works is like a yellow pages whois lookup based on your name/birthday/mailing address pairing which is completely ass backwards imo. I'm not interested in what details you have associated with my name I might share with 50 other people, I want to see everything connect to my online id's and if that includes my name phone numbers etc I want to exercise control over who has what and why. I still think it should be us, the consumers, who issue the Terms of Service to the users of our data not the other way around.