A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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“Your Privacy is our Business” is also a Google slogan
If you want that service, don’t consider anything else besides EasyOptOuts, it’s both the cheapest and most effective option.
How is it the most effective option? They seem to cover less sites than others
IIRC, they’re not a scam, but they also aren’t doing anything you couldn’t do yourself. They’re just sending opt-out requests to data brokers on your behalf.
There are hundreds of those data brokers. And new ones opening as others close every week. Doing it yourself, and keeping up with it on a regular basis? That’s nearly a full time job. Nobody does that.
There’s a lot of those though
How time-consuming would doing it yourself be, if anyone here has tried?
I used to spend one day each year doing all the opt outs and data delete requests i could find. it was going well for me until this year. i averaged about 2-3 spam emails a day, combined across 5 different emails, one was made all the way back in 1997 and two of them were made when gmail first started.
someone got breached this year, i don’t know who, and now i get a lot more.
i also used firefox monitor to check for info on breach websites and darkweb lists, around the same time i started getting more spam, my list of breached info went from ~16 to 600+.
I’ve tried, it sucks. Each broker has their own process, often several steps, and often a step is broken (like server errors, can’t get past a captcha, “try again later”, etc). You end up not just having to do the process, but also follow up with many of the ones that are ambiguous or returned server errors or whatnot. I did the top 8 or so brokers and then stopped.
Quite. Some of them make it as difficult as possible, requiring the request to be physically printed and sent in via the post. Some hide the information regarding how to make the request as obscurely as possible. And essentially none of them treat it as a ‘and don’t collect any more’ request so they just start up a new collection on you the next time you do basically anything with one of their ‘business partners.’ Allowing people to request deletion is just the excuse they use to keep collection legal when it shouldn’t be.
Reject Convenience did a pretty good breakdown of DeleteMe, Incogni and the data broker industry on their YouTube channel a while back. It’s a good overview but, fair warning, it might send you down a bit of a rabbit hole after watching.
video
Invidious link because icky YouTube: https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA
Can you put a tl;dw here? Are they scams?
Seriously. It’s criminal to not include a summary in a case like that.
Reject Convience does privacy policy reading streams, and has a pretty hard stance on no TLDRs. If you don’t have time to watch it, save it for later. Better that than to trust a random person’s 5 word TLDR.
A tldr isn’t sufficient to determine if something’s a scam or not. It’d be negligent/sketchy to include one.
If you have a Discover card, they offer a service like this for free. I’m not sure how good it is, but since they already have my information I figured it was fine to use their service instead of increasing my footprint by passing my info to another company. It also hasn’t found anything since I started using it because I did what they do manually, years ago.
They are discontinuing the service January 15, 2026.
This is the second time I’ve seen this info yet I can’t find anything with discover anywhere.
They are discontinuing the service :(
It no longer exists and they’re being sold to Capital One 🙃
Several og the big privacy people have recommended them online, e.g. Techlore, so I’d say yes. Though it’s been a couple years since I saw those reviews, and I haven’t read up on them recently.
EDIT: Grammar.
Might want to edit that again for spelling, too. Lol
No they don’t. EasyOptOuts is the one TechLore recommends and also the one Consumer Reports recommends for your best bang for buck.
Oh well, they did in the past.
There are several companies that do this.
Even Mozilla did until this month.
DeleteMe seems not to be the best. They might sell data to places while getting it removed from other places.
I just signed up with Incogni which is one of the biggest.
According to the wiki page you linked, incogni are owned by surfshark.
Is there a Firefox Extension that does it still orrrr…?
Not the kind if thing you can do with an extension.
Every broker has their own process. Some even require actual physical letters be sent to remove your data.
Oh.
heard that stuff like deleteme and incogni sell your data to other places so if you ever stop subscribing so I’d avoid it myself 🤷
you can do it yourself, find a list of brokers and send the same mail/pdf or whatever to them all