Consumer Reports and Tall Poppy released a new report on people-search site removal services. They used 32 volunteer test subjects from California and New York.
We used seven people-search removal services (Confidently, DeleteMe, EasyOptOuts, IDX, Kanary, Optery, and ReputationDefender) to attempt to delete participant profile data from 13 people-search sites (BeenVerified, CheckPeople, ClustrMaps, Dataveria, Intelius, MyLife, Nuwber, PeopleFinders, PublicDataUSA, Radaris, Spokeo, ThatsThem, and Whitepages).
Findings
As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective.
Manual opt-outs were more effective than people-search removal services but were also far from perfect.
Of the information removed within four months, most was removed within a week.
Some people-search removal services advertise on or partner with people-search sites.
We found no significant difference in the success rate of removing data between renters and homeowners.
Some people-search sites removed more data in response to removal service requests than others.
Considering the news a few months ago that many opt out services have the same parent company as people search sites, this isn’t to surprising to say the least.
A couple things I wish there was more information about in the report:
How many profiles total did each person have reported by each service
Why did they not check back to see if the users had new profiles after their initial removal? Seems like a glaring black hole in the methodology.
Did any of the services they used have legitimate ties to data brokers/people search site? That would be very useful before I decide to use one of these sites
I mostly agree as well. Paying $20 for someone to do 92% of the work (68%/70%) seems like the best value of all these options. Assuming that the company is trustworthy of course.
So, I’m just at 2 months with delete me, 7 weeks after my initial report and multiple sites still have my information up. I reached out to them and they’re going back through the list refiling the take down requests. If it works I’ll be happy. Instead of having to chase down customer support for all of these companies I’m viewing it as, I’m paying DeleteMe to handle the companies for me while I just fact check their take downs and request more as I find them.
Definitely report back whether it works, that’d be good to know about them.
I know DeleteMe is popular across various YouTube channels and other sites, but I was never convinced of their quality based on the reviews I’ve read (which this report seems to back up as well), and as far as I understand it they only check ~90 sites even though their list says “750+” (scroll to the footnotes to see why).
They don’t seem to be mentioned outside that page and some help documents, and they don’t give pricing anywhere on their site, but I saw some reviews saying Platinum—which isn’t even the highest—was $1000/year.
If anything they should do a test how effective this is long term, if your deleting all that data, and you stop your subscription, how long does it take for these sites to repopulate themselves.
Well, based off of the first 2 months, not well. TruePeopleFinder still had me up. But like i said, its pestering one company rather than multiple. I’m just checking myself with the tools on IntelTechniques.com to verify take downs. If another couple of months pass without more success though I’ll be having words with their customer support team.
Edit: Hasn’t Henry from Techlore mentioned using DeleteMe himself? Do you know if he’s had much luck with them?
Same here, also using intel techniques as a useful resource, which includes both the people finder sites and the search engines. I search for my name and other related information every now and then to see what information is floating around. I don’t use any of the removal services as I believe they are just a con. We could aggregate an open source list of data broker email addresses by site with templated text for the emails. All the data removal sites have done is automate this process. Is this worth $249? Fuck no lol.
One additional thing I do is spread disinformation. The best way to do it is to go directly to the sites where the data brokers get their data from, especially sites like LinkedIn. They are getting scraped practically every hour of every day. I make the profiles look legit, but in reality most of the information is completely false.
There is no way to stop financial institutions, payment processors, social media platforms, and other sites from sharing your data. It will be shared, so it might as well be fake by the time it arrives in the data broker’s database. Using PMBs helps as well, especially when providing different PMBs to different banks and institutions, which allows you to see who is sharing what. Similar to emails, albeit a bit more costly.
Years ago there was a tool on GitHub which would handle this, which went abandoned. It’d be nice if someone released an open-source tool, but there seems to be a lot of money in not doing so and selling the services instead lol
