[micromacrofoot]

Data brokers are like the hydra, one goes down and another 2 new ones pop up. It's a lot of work to keep on top of deletions if you want privacy.

[quatrefoil]

Not really. There's a fairly small and stable number of companies that actually collect and resell information about you. There is also about a zillion ephemeral web front ends that republish this data, however. I suspect this is done for a reason, but a bit of sleuthing quickly reveals who the big players are.

These "data removal" services spend a lot of effort going after the frontends, which is pretty self-serving: they can show the customer that there's something new to remove every single month or quarter, so you have to keep paying forever.

[micromacrofoot]

“There is also about a zillion ephemeral web front ends that republish this data, however”

yes this is what I mean, you need to contact each one to have data removed… there are hundreds of these

[jart]

What else could they do? They're working within a system that the government designed, and the government always designs things to keep people running on the hamster wheel.

[quatrefoil]

Request deletion from backend brokers? Many have some mechanisms for opt-out, either in general or for people in specific states (e.g., California).

[jart]

OK so if Optery reports 330 removals, how many removals did they actually have to do on their end? A hundred? Thirty? Ten? Why should we care? If you pay a man to remove the snow from your driveway, would you be upset if he used a plow rather than a shovel?

[makeitdouble]

Wouldn't you be upset if you paid him hourly so he used a spoon and went slowly enough that snow accumulates faster than he'll ever clear your driveway ?

Parent's argument is that current approach leads to an endless cat and mouse game the user ends up paying, when there would be ways to end it faster and cheaper.

[jart]

Yes but how is that the fault of removal services? They can't do anything to stop the usual suspects from filing for a fresh corporation from Delaware each week.

[micromacrofoot]

you have to contact all of them, they purchased the data and it’s usually in their own separate database

[bigyikes]

I don’t necessarily doubt you, but do you have any source for this, or in general any information on the landscape of data brokers?

It’s hard to imagine what the situation actually looks like behind the scenes.

[micromacrofoot]

there are a handful of large data brokers like lexisnexis, they’ll sell their scraped public data to anyone

random companies will buy the data, do a little collation and merge datasets from multiple sources, start their own frontend, and resell it to consumers doing google searches for phone numbers, names, etc

because they’re not directly affiliated with the primary brokers, there are hundreds of these independent frontends… and unless you contact each one, they can all resell their data (even to each other)

so if you miss one removal, it’s possible your data gets picked up by a new frontend from that frontend… your data can kind of proliferate through this gross ether forever