[ary]

I’m a happy, long term Optery user (not affiliated) and they take care of 100% of this for you. https://www.optery.com

The Mozilla offering looks somewhat comparable, but I do wonder if they’re going to beat a company which has the sole focus of solving this problem.

[haswell]

Also an unaffiliated, long term, and happy user of Optery.

If nothing else, I’m glad there are more offerings showing up on this space because of the competition this will hopefully generate.

Consumer Reports also has a semi-related offering called “Permission Slip” that is focused on opting out of data sharing with individual companies, e.g. Netflix, Home Depot, etc.

[geor9e]

Haha wow it's actually asking me to sign over LIMITED POWER OF ATTORNEY. It's optional but says it's recommended. That's a nope from me.

[beyondd]

Many data brokers will not permit third party services to remove the data without a signed limited power of attorney. Note that the power of attorney is limited to interactions for submitting removal requests and opt outs.

[GuB-42]

Isn't it to be expected? I guess that they have to make demands on your behalf to have your data removed. I guess that's optional because they can still work without it is some cases, and ask you on a case-by-case basis for others, but that's extra work for you and for them, so they may not do it, at least not on the lower tier pricing.

[khaki54]

Why? You limit the power of attorney to the ability to remove your data from data brokers.

[darknavi]

Blame data brokers for making such asinine restrictions.

You can also just use the free version to collect a list of brokers your self and manually contact all of them to find out how much of a pain in the ass it is.

[anjel]

I cleared my name from the net using another service that charged by the month. I paid them for three months, when their work clearing my data from about 100+brokers was completed, then cancelled. 2 years later, my name and personal data still remain no longer to be found like it once was before the scrubbing.

[Vinnl]

That's great to hear, often they do show up again later, which is why it's a longer-term subscription service. OneRep is the provider for the removal functionality of Monitor, incidentally.

[rayshan]

What is the service you used?

[anjel]

OneRep. I'm a once and former customer, otherwise unaffiliated.

[Workaccount2]

I can't help but be a bit miffed that despite ostensibly being a privacy service, optery is still running a bunch of third party scripts on their site, including google...

[HaloZero]

I'm curious, what's the point of paying for Optery per year? Isn't removing your data be a one time request. Except for supporting new brokers that might appear.

[beyondd]

Your point is spot on. Data removal services have an aspect where a ton of value is obtained in the first 1 - 4 months as the majority of profiles are wiped away, and then after that you're sort of in maintenance mode where the service catches profiles as they pop back up, or when new data brokers are added to the system for coverage.

Optery generally has 2 types of customers:

- The first type are those that care a lot about their privacy and the cost of an ongoing subscription is insignificant to them, so they keep the service running on an ongoing basis for the ongoing automated scans and removals and for getting new data brokers they get coverage for immediately as they are added into the system.

- The second type of customer is more price conscious and is basically looking back and forth between their credit card statement and their Optery dashboard each month and then they either pause or cancel the subscription when they feel they're reached a good stopping point. Optery's pause subscription feature is very popular for this type of customer and you can use it to automatically re-start the service in 3, 6, 9 months, etc.

- Another thing to point out is many other services only offer Yearly subscriptions, Optery offers Yearly or Monthly. If you're price conscious, the Monthly is nice because you can turn it on and off, or pause it as you wish.

More detail on the topic of keeping Optery running on an ongoing basis is on the Optery Help Desk here:

https://help.optery.com/en/article/why-should-i-keep-my-opte...

[mamidon]

Have you considered adding a 3-months-every-year option? I wonder if automating the second type of customer would provide you a lift in revenue.

[beyondd]

This is a great suggestion and we would like to add this. Not because it would provide any revenue lift though, but because it is what some Optery customers have been asking for, e.g. can I have a lower cost subscription that runs every other month, or every three months, etc. Technically, you can do this today by cancelling and re-starting a Monthly subscription at your desired cadence, or pausing and re-starting your subscription periodically, but that requires manual effort. A configurable cadence is definitely on our backlog though.

[megasquid]

Also a satisfied Optery user. Been using their service for the past year, from what I can tell, they seem to have the most robust solution in the space.

[tholtken]

Especially with a backend service provider (onerep.com) that is questionable at best.

[eltondegeneres]

What are the issues with Mozilla's use of onerep?

[beyondd]

One of the issues are OneRep's affiliate partnerships with the very data brokers you're paying them to remove you from: https://imgur.com/a/juSC66b

[sp0rk]

I think "partnership" seems like too strong a word for what appears to be the simple use of an affiliate program. Why would OneRep know or care about an individual affiliate and the content of their site, as long as their behavior with regards to the affiliate program is above-board?

[beyondd]

Affiliate programs have application processes intended to filter out bad actors and mis-alignment with a brand. To use an extreme example, a web site promoting terrorism would typically be rejected. Approving data brokers as affiliate partners for a data broker removal service is viewed by many as questionable. To use an another extreme example, how would you feel about an anti-virus software company that approved as affiliate partners creators and distributors of computer virus programs.

[anjel]

OneRep is the service I used, briefly. I have no Affilliation with them except as past customer. They delivered as promised and the effect has been persistent 2+ years since the time I discontinued the subscription.

[fdgadfagfgd]

Any other issues besides that possible conflict of interest? Also, you're the founder of a competing service, right?

[wolverine876]

They are. There's a flagged dead comment where they say so (I don't know if this link will work for a flagged dead comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39276106

beyonddd should really identify themselves as the founder of a competitor. Nothing wrong with posting, but pseudo-anonymously disparaging the competition seems very inappropriate.

[beyondd]

Yes - I flagged myself as an Optery founder on my first comment, but as you mentioned the comment was subsequently flagged and hidden from view. It is also made clear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=beyondd

[tholtken]

not affiliated with Optery but agree conflict of interest, also misleading by onerep and at best deceptive. take that potential lack of trust together with the several reports online that onerep's us operation is a sham and they are really operating out of eastern europe and sending user data there...seems shady. begs the question: what does a privacy-respecting org like Mozilla see in onerep and how is it better than what other companies offer?

[beyondd]

Yes - I flagged myself as an Optery founder on my first comment, but the comment was subsequently flagged and hidden from view (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39276106). It is also made clear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=beyondd

[PascLeRasc]

Discover bank also offers something like this for free, but I can't tell if it's as capable as other services. https://www.discover.com/security/online-privacy-protection/

[kanary]

Discover's service is limited to only a few sites (which is why it's free). And it is not transparent about progress of removals or requirements.

That might not be the most effective way to reduce spam or reduce targeted attacks, because it ignores many hard to remove exposures.

We have a similar price point at Kanary (I'm the founder) and it covers the resources we invest in the cat & mouse game required to escalate and complete removals on a wide variety of sites, not just a handful of easy ones.

[pininja]

Anyone have experience comparing this to Incogni? I’ve been an unaffiliated user for over a year now. While many brokers have replied, many never seem to.

[beyondd]

Optery founder here. We did a deep dive comparison between Incogni and Optery (https://www.optery.com/incogni-review/). The biggest takeaway is Incogni, at this time, does not cover many of the most popular people search sites like Whitepages, TruePeopleSearch, Spokeo, RocketReach, ThatsThem, BeenVerified, TruthFinder, InstantCheckmate, and many others. Most Incogni reviews you'll find online are written by their affiliate partners.

[Urgo]

beyondd, I've been reading through this thread and your comments about Optery and you got me to sign up for an account on your site vs Mozilla's service so good job. I was even going to pay for your Ultimate plan for a year. But.... you lost me when I got to the profile page. I have a handful of email addresses and a couple of phone numbers. I would want them all to be scanned for. I had previously been using experian's removal service and they allowed for 10 emails and 5 phone numbers.

Your documentation says:

"You can only select one email and one phone number for scans at this time. However, Optery's engineering team is actively working on providing more configuration options such as the ability to run scans on demand for multiple email addresses and phone numbers."

Any comments on when this will be an option? I would want automatic scans on all of my emails and phone numbers. Not very useful for me without this.

[beyondd]

The core of Optery's search functionality is "person" centric. Meaning we start with searches by name, city, state, and age to find "you" regardless of which underlying email or phone number the data broker has on record for you. Because in many cases data brokers may have no email or phone on file for you at all (only home address), or they may have a really old phone or email you have forgotten about. When data removal service scans focus only on phone numbers and email addresses, a lot can get missed. Many people search sites are not even queryable by phone or email, and are only queryable by name, city, and state. Optery does search for phones and emails, but you are correct in that it currently limits them to just one each from the customer at this time. We plan to release the scan on demand feature you referenced in the next few months.

That said, Optery recursively searches through data exposed by data brokers to alleviate the need to input numerous old phones and emails by the customer. In PCMag.com review they said this of Optery's recursive phone number search functionality:

"It uses data found in data broker profiles to recursively expand its reach. For example, in my latest testing, I only gave it my current phone number, but it found records associated with an old number that I used for some 25 years."

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

[Urgo]

Thank you for the reply! I suppose that does make sense, though it still doesn't give a warm fuzzy feel separating the functionality. While the average human might only have one email address they use, I'd venture to say people who would want a service such as this would skew more towards having many they use for privacy reasons.

I get what you're saying about how emails aren't the primary means of finding people, but it is a way, and something people often do have more then one of. I'd humbly request you reconsider and try to better incorporate support for automated scans on multiple emails/phones into the main product. For what its worth it looks like Mozilla's product supports 5 based on their docs.

That said, after submitting this comment I'm going to go ahead and sign up for the one year ultimate anyway in hopes that you will reconsider my request if I'm a paid user. :)

[beyondd]

Thanks for the follow up! Scans for multiple phones and emails is something we're working on so stay tuned on that, and don't hesitate to contact customer support with any questions along the way!

Also, you mentioned using Experian's data removal service previously. Do you mind me asking how many exposed profiles the Optery scan located that Experian missed?