Some of the well-known services include Kanary, Optery, and DeleteMe, as well as newer options like Mozilla Monitor and the removal service offered with DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Pro membership.
Is there a “gold standard” among these services? I find it difficult to rely on “best data removal service” lists from Wired or NYT. Any recommendations or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.
There aproach is all wrong I think the redact dev guys were working on a good solution.
Best solution is just googling yourself and DMCA stuff, delete old account etc.
I remember seeing a discussion about this in here. I don’t recall comments questioning their services outcomes. Can you delve in the aforementioned inefficiencies?
Personally I adopted this approach. I have a pretty unique identity therefore very finger-printable. I think it took me a year or more to have a lot of my internet services unsubscribed and DMCA. My data still available in the dark web, afaik there isn’t much that I can do to have it removed and I’ll have to live with that lesson. The work now is to contain the damage and not make myself more exposed in the future. PG helped me a lot in this journey. I still consider if I should additionally to the work that I’ve done get some data removal service. Pretty sure that I missed a bunch of things. The three services mentioned by the OP are looking good and I don’t know if in this case there is a gold standard like he is looking. I’d go with the more affordable probably. Please take in consideration that this is an opinion without much invested time and I don’t want to influence any decision on this matter.
I use Kanary and it’s been working fine. edit: not anymore
I have been eyeing Optery as a potential replacement though, it looks like it might be a bit better. I haven’t actually switched though, so I can’t yet say whether or not it is actually better.
Optery does have a decent free plan for scanning if you want to put in the work to actually remove records yourself afterwards.
Optery does look like it has more coverage. I started a free trial with both and got 23 results with Kanary and 63 with Optery.
The nice thing about Kanary though is that it does general internet searches instead of just searching a pre-set list of sites.
That being said, you could probably set up Google search alerts to achieve a similar effect.
Inteltechniques by Michael Bazzell has some tools to help search yourself in the common places and there are instructions for how to file take downs there as well. I’m using DeleteMe myself and then supplementing with random searches on browsers and through Intel Techniques.
Optery is available only for US residents. Atleast that’s wht it says during registration.
I use Optery and have for ~2 years. I’ve been very satisfied with the service so far. I don’t have the free time to sift through the hundreds of data broker websites myself so having a service that does it for me is preferred.
We’ve now published guidance on this topic on our website:
Is this strictly for the U.S.? Are you aware of this working in any other countries? Asking for a friend 
The correct approach is to build an app that runs locally on your device and programmatically sends the DMCA’s and fill opt-out forms. (hence your data never leaves your personal device)
People at redact.dev are working on something like this, and their ceo, Dan plans to launch the beta at the end of this month.
I agree, I didn’t know redact.dev was working on that though. I was really considering doing this myself and that might save me the trouble 