One of the privacy tools I have seen floated around in various communities are data removal services like DeleteMe, Optery, etc. They do the hard work of going to all the people search websites and performing takedown requests of your data. This is nice, because the data can pop up again over time on many of these sites. However, most of these services are relatively expensive, from as low as $3 a month to as much as $20 a month (and those are just the public facing numbers, DeleteMe has hidden tiers).
That is where EasyOptOuts comes in: $19.99 a year, removals every 4 months, and seems to have the best bang for the buck when it comes to this Consumer Reports report Consumer Reports: Evaluating People-Search Site Removal Services
Since its so cheap, I wanted to see how well they could do on myself. Some quick things you should know before hand: I had already performed manual data opt outs on the IntelTechniques “BEST BANG FOR YOUR BUCK” sites: Spokeo, Mylife, Radaris, Whitepages, Intelius, BeenVerified, Acxiom, Infotracer, Lexis Nexis and TruePeopleSearch. This takes out a decent chunk of sites already, but there are stranglers.
The sign up process is 11 steps, and asks for basic info to find you on these sites. Not all of it is required, but opt outs might be missed if you don’t add past addresses, other names, emails, or relatives.
So what did EasyOptOuts find, what do they support, what do they not, and how fast are they?
I signed up on a Saturday, and on Monday I had my first report! Here is what it looks like:
Some of these sites look like they are related, like all the peoplewiz ones so I feel like they are inflating their numbers a bit.
Now for where my info wasn’t available:
Many of these I believe either didn’t have my info before, or had been gotten by my manual removals.
Some sites they always do opt outs for:
The Lexis Nexis sites that are searchable make me think they could reduce the amount of opt outs sent if they searched those sites before performing a take down.
And some final info:
I am glad they tell you how to opt out of the sites that they currently don’t support, so a reminder to check on them every 4 months is nice.
This report isn’t super in depth: no screenshots of data they found, no estimate of how much time they saved me, etc. But if it works, it works. I’ll be checking back in a couple weeks to see if any of my info is back on any of the sites they opted me out of, but so far for $20 a year, I am satisfied right now.