I was curious about how good of an idea it would be to use Optery as either an alternative to, or in addition to, EasyOptOuts for mass data broker information removal.
I read some of the historical forum posts here regarding Optery, where I learned that it was previously recommended on Privacy Guides officially. However, it was removed due to some OpenAI integrations that were introduced into their platform. Some of the replies in those threads suggested that their OpenAI integrations were fairly minimal and that concerns were addressed with opt-in/opt-out toggles on the settings page after the initial user complaints. Also, Optery users have said that the platform covers a large gamut of data broker sites beyond what competitors like Incogni and DeleteMe offer, and that it is more effective in general. Additionally, I was considering it since it remains a top recommendation on Techlore’s resources page, with Henry himself stating that he actually uses both EasyOptOuts and Optery together for his data broker removal solution. So I am wondering whether it might be reasonable for me to do the same or something similar.
My overall goal is to hopefully scrub as much data about me from broker sites as conceivably possible without needing to spend hours manually researching and opting out by hand.
Optery Ultimate is (their only plan that’s) an effective service, but it does not make much sense to me. @yaelwrites has a chart here which details the services that EasyOptOuts (and Optery) does and does not cover:
We can see there’s 17 major services EasyOptOuts does not cover, compared to 11 Optery Ultimate does not cover. If you have EasyOptOuts and add Optery Ultimate, there are 9 that Optery covers which EasyOptOuts doesn’t, bringing the total down to 8 from 17 you’re still missing coverage on.
I would say only 9 additional major services is probably not worth the $200-$250/year you would need to pay Optery. Either way you will want to manually opt out of a handful from the list above, and there’s info on how to do that here:
The spreadsheet above is the best comparison of these services, not comparing the number of sites they claim to remove data from. The problem is that many sites are run by the same underlying data broker, so counting all of those can inflate the number of sites these data removal services can claim in their marketing, without providing much actual benefit.
We would recommend buying EasyOptOuts, then checking and opting-out of one of the 17 remaining services every week, repeating your checks on a loop when you get to the end. You want to repeat this because they can sometimes come back, but a 5-minute weekly task is generally managable for most people.