[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) - Remove your personal in...
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Launch HN: Optery (YC W22) - Remove your personal info from the
internet
Hi HN, we're Lawrence, Chen and Dekel from Optery
(https://www.optery.com/). Optery is opt out software that removes
your home address, phone number, email, age, and other private info
from the internet. Specifically, we find and delete your profiles
on hundreds of data broker and people-search web sites. Sites like
Radaris, SocialCatfish, VoterRecords.com, Persopo, PeekYou, and
WhitePages.com scrape the internet for the personal information of
as many people as they can find, plus buy it in bulk from other
sources. Then they post it online and sell it to anyone who wants
to know about you. This is legal (though there are a lot of gray
areas), but the net result is that a shocking amount of personal
data is available about us online. Most of these sites will remove
your data if you ask--but they don't make it easy. Plus you have to
ask each of them individually, and to do that, you have to know who
they are in the first place. We automate the opt-out process on
these sites, first finding your exposed profiles, and then removing
your information from both the public internet and the datasets
they sell. Because there are hundreds of such sites, it's
impractical to manage all this on your own. Software, however, can
manage it nicely. We've written that software. This helps protect
you from identity theft, phishing, hacking, spamming, doxing, and
more. People search sites are used not only by identity thieves,
but by phishers and hackers who craft convincing emails referencing
non-obvious personal details as a way to build trust and trick you
or those close to you into letting your guard down. We arrived at
this problem from two opposite directions. Two of us worked in the
data broker industry in the past, but as we learned more about what
this data actually gets used for, and the harms it can cause, we
decided to leave. We had a lot of inside knowledge about how the
industry worked and decided to use that knowledge to help people
learn more about the problem and address it head on. The other
thing that happened was that I was a victim of identity theft. The
thieves were able to open new accounts in my name by creating a
fake ID and then piecing together information to bypass
verification questions like "In which of the following cities have
you never lived or used in your address?" or "Which of the
following streets has a current or former association with you?" I
found it was nearly impossible to remove myself from the Byzantine
ecosystem of data brokers posting and selling his info online. Once
the dust had cleared, we began discussing approaches to automating
opt out and removal requests and Optery was born. The problem is
hard to solve for two reasons. First, there are so many data
brokers, each with their own nuances and distinct processes for opt
outs. So far we've built custom opt out processes for over 200 data
brokers. Second, most U.S. citizens actually still have few legal
rights to data privacy. Optery is only for U.S. residents for the
time being, and this is one main reasons--the problem is at its
worst here. This is changing as new privacy laws are starting to
get passed at the state level (e.g. in California, Nevada, and
Virginia), but as of this writing the majority of U.S. citizens
don't even have a legal right to opt out of their personal
information being posted and sold online, and in our experience,
about 5% of data brokers simply do not comply with opt out
requests. In these cases we file formal complaints to the FTC and
state AG offices, and we recommend you do the same. They are slow
to act on these complaints unfortunately, but at least the wheels
are in motion, and we believe this issue will eventually get taken
care of as more people become aware of the problem. In the
meantime, we continue to send opt out requests regardless, and are
able remove personal data from the other 95%. One nuance of the
opt-out process, which existing services tend not to handle
correctly, is that you should avoid sending an opt out request to a
data broker unless you are reasonably sure that the provider has
your data in the first place. Otherwise you're giving them
information about you, when what you want is just the opposite!
Some other services just take a long list of privacy@ email
addresses for every data broker they can find, and then blast out
generic opt out requests containing all of your identifying
information, regardless of whether or not the data broker even has
your information to begin with. But the Achilles' heel of these
sites is that they rely heavily on the open web for marketing: SEO,
affiliate programs, and paid search ads. Therefore they mostly
support HTTP GET requests in standardized formats to reach
individual people's profiles, e.g. https://www.data-
broker.com/person? firstName=george&lastName=orwell&city=new-
york&state=NY. We take advantage of this to find out which
providers have you in their database first, before invoking the
formal opt-out. These HTTP requests require less information than
the formal opt-out processes do, plus are buried inside of the
millions of other search requests that are happening through their
open web marketing channels (e.g. paid search affiliate, SEO, etc).
We've been able to find many more exposed profiles this way than
the more old-fashioned approaches other services use such as manual
searches and the bulk "spray and pray" emails. Also, it lets us
provide our users with a dashboard full of these links they can use
to discover and verify what's out there on them. Many people prefer
to submit opt out requests on their own, or are already working
with a different removal service; in those cases, our dashboard can
be used to double-check and verify that work. Visibility and
transparency is rarely available to consumers in the world of
personal data, so when we demo the product to people who care about
their data privacy, it's often a "wow" moment. A common question
we get is "And what about you? Why should I trust _you_ to collect
my data any more than these shady outfits?" To be clear, we do not
sell data. We are not a data broker, and do not have any financial
relationship or any affiliation with any data broker. If you are
looking at an information removal service, research the company
carefully. Many other services have deep ties into the data broker
industry through affiliate partnerships, data sharing arrangements,
and financial relationships. We do not. More on that here:
https://www.optery.com/privacy-policy/. You can delete your account
at any time and all information we hold about you will be
destroyed. Unfortunately, there is a catch-22 where in order to
opt out of people-search sites, you must first tell them who you
are (otherwise, how else would they know who to opt out!). To
create an Optery account, we require only the minimum amount of
information necessary for this, which is: First Name, Last Name,
Year of Birth, Current City, and Current State. For most people,
this is no more information than what is already publicly available
online. We also offer users the option to give us more precise
details (such as a full birth date rather than just birth year,
past addresses, etc.) because this can increase the accuracy of
locating profiles at data brokers and opt outs. This is entirely
optional though. The only required info is the absolute minimum,
without which there would be no point in creating an account,
because we would not be able to find or remove you. We have a
freemium model. When someone creates an account, we send them a
free Exposure Report with ~70 screen shots of where they've been
found, which lets them see where their personal details are posted
online and being exploited by data brokers. From there, they can
decide if they'd like to use our free tools to submit opt out
requests on their own self-service, or they can upgrade to a paid
tier and we'll remove the profiles for them. We launched Optery as
a Show HN last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662114)
and the feedback from the community was enormously helpful. We
prioritized a bunch of features like adding MFA, expanding our list
of data brokers, streamlining UX, and clarifying our privacy terms
and practices, all based on feedback from our Show HN. We'd love to
hear your thoughts on the current iteration!
Author : beyondd
Score : 213 points
Date : 2022-03-08 19:22 UTC (1 days ago)
| cacarbonate wrote:
| Mandatum wrote:
| So many of these providers have been bought or are already owned
| by the same sites they remove data from, or credit reporting
| businesses.
|
| It's all a data gathering exercise - and given the lax privacy
| policy of this site, I wouldn't sign up with them. It's way too
| open and non-explicit. Particularly sharing data with third-
| parties, cases for using the data, analysing the data, etc.
|
| Pass.
| jart wrote:
| Looks legit to me.
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery
|
| https://www.optery.com/privacy-policy/
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I'm just insanely glad to not reside in countries where data
| privacy laws are completely horrible.
|
| The amount of OSINT available on americans is like 2-3$ to access
| and on each search I can see stuff in your family history even
| which is just incredibly crazy. Doesn't work on people from other
| countries.
|
| Food for thought.
| loriverkutya wrote:
| After the unroll.me incident, I cannot trust any US company not
| to do it again.
| pbiggar wrote:
| I have this problem, except that my phone number is associated
| with my old company. So I get dozens of spam phone calls every
| week from sales people believing that they are calling the
| switchboard for the company, and asking to be connected to some
| random executive.
|
| Would Optery be able to help with that?
| beyondd wrote:
| Yes - Optery definitely helps with this, but it's not a silver
| bullet yet. If your phone number is already out there
| circulating, I would recommend:
|
| (a) Start by opting out of as many of the data brokers as you
| can, in particular the B2B contacts data brokers that are most
| likely the source of these unwanted phone calls like
| RocketReach, ContactOut, Clearbit, Hunter.io, LeadIQ, ZoomInfo,
| etc. Many of these data brokers Optery already covers, but
| others we are still in the process of adding to coverage.
|
| (b) You can use Optery to opt out of a large chunk of these
| data brokers (200+ as of today), but you might need to
| supplement that with your own effort until we can catch up to
| the rest of them. We're constantly adding more data brokers to
| our list of covered every month.
|
| (c) Update your visibility settings on LinkedIn. A lot of
| information gets leaked out onto the web from LinkedIn, and in
| particular into the B2B contacts data brokers mentioned above:
| https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a523134/visibi...
|
| (d) Do not include your phone number or title on your email
| signature - many of the B2B contacts data brokers have data co-
| ops where all of their millions of customers share contacts and
| they parse through the email signatures in your email
|
| (e) After you have done all of the above, and have reduced the
| footprint and presence of your phone number in these different
| places, change your phone number.
| jonthepirate wrote:
| 16 years ago, my first Bay Area engineering job was at Reputation
| Defender. I helped create their first product - the EXACT same
| thing it looks like Optery is making. Make no mistake, the
| company was named "reputation defender" but it was optery.
|
| Even in 2006, the problem was the same and the solution seems
| roughly the same.
|
| Reputation Defender rebranded a few times. I don't think they
| have this feature anymore. Might be worth asking them why they
| got rid of it, if that's what they did do.
|
| Working there on the tool, I always felt like it was pointless
| because it's an unsolvable problem and scrubbing your info from a
| few hundred of the top data collection sites wouldn't SOLVE the
| problem... it just makes it a tiny bit less terrible but the
| effectiveness is not measurable. I think the TLDR is that people
| want solutions to things and programmatically unsubscribing only
| "works" in well lit neighborhoods and those too often aren't the
| causes of consumer pain.
|
| Trying to solve the problem by deleting records is sort of like
| contract tracing coronavirus. Efforts to solve the problem by
| stomping it out wasn't viable and we now know we just need to
| learn to live with it in the endemic phase.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Then how come I know some very rich people who have managed to
| opt out so hard I can't even see their old messages?
| jimmydorry wrote:
| I imagine having a team of layers work on this problem for a
| year or two could result in going on a "do not mess with"
| list amongst the majority of data brokers. Your information
| might be worth a few bucks, but I reckon a rich person's data
| (who is willing to put on the pressure) is a liability.
| newman314 wrote:
| The Ultimate plan is supposed to cover BlockShopper. From the
| last time I looked at this several years ago, it is basically
| impossible to remove information from BlockShopper. What has
| changed?
| beyondd wrote:
| We have a page up on our Help Desk referencing data brokers
| that ignore opt out requests (the 5% mentioned in the post
| above). We refer to these data brokers as "Dishonorable Data
| Brokers". BlockShopper is one of them.
|
| We prefer not to give Dishonorable Data Brokers a free pass,
| and continue to pursue multiple channels to have our customers'
| profiles removed from these data brokers, even if they are
| currently "Dishonorable" and do not honor opt outs, like
| BlockShopper.
|
| We have seen cases in the past where through persistence,
| dishonorable data brokers eventually start honoring opt out
| requests. Below is the Help Desk post with more info on this
| topic:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/coverage-limitations-for-...
| seb1204 wrote:
| Are you using or following legal means to remove the records?
| sabihmir wrote:
| Love Optery!! Get my name off of everything.
| sireat wrote:
| Can Optery help with cleaning / opting out of Google Knowledge
| Panel?
|
| Right now a search for my first and last name bring up a
| knowledge panel with my full date of birth.
|
| I suppose I am lucky because it is correct DOB but still feels
| unsettling.
|
| I have not claimed my Knowledge Panel because I am afraid it
| would show even more information.
|
| It is such a tiny thing but if there was a way to revert to just
| showing my age it would be amazing.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'd like to take you at face value and not kind of low-key impugn
| your honor as seems to be happening in some of these other
| comments. But I still see a problem with the basic core concept
| here. As you state upfront, these data brokers are just scraping
| and aggregating from public data sources. As long as those data
| sources are still out there, your information is still out there.
| Some other aggregator can come along or a stalker/identity thief
| can just use primary sources. You're not going to get court
| records, property ownership, voter registration purged from
| public view because those are intended to be public by law.
|
| The real solutions are one or both of either make privacy a
| broader public priority than transparency, which is unlikely to
| happen, or stop making facts about yourself that are part of the
| public record an authentication mechanism.
| beyondd wrote:
| To take your first point one further, services like ours don't
| do anything to remove people's info from the dark web. Indeed,
| no one can, that's the entire premise of the dark web.
|
| And there are some data sets that are inherently difficult to
| remove, e.g. public records, voter records, etc (as you pointed
| out). However, we often can get this type of data removed from
| the for-profit web sites that re-publish it and market it
| online. And we do remove the vast majority of information
| that's out there on individuals, dramatically reducing your
| surface area for discovery and attack. For example, many of the
| web sites that re-publish public records, usually only publish
| very limited amount of information, and lead to other sites
| that have much richer and more sensitive information like phone
| number, email address, age, home address, family members'
| names, etc.
|
| Its very difficult to get _everything_ removed, but if you can
| get rid of 99% of it, you can maintain a much lower profile and
| make it that much more difficult for someone that 's trying to
| act against you. If a bad actor is just looking for a victim,
| they're more likely to move on to the next person that has done
| nothing to protect themselves.
|
| Also, having a low profile might be a signal to bad actors that
| you take your privacy and security seriously, you have good
| security hygiene, and are likely to have other security
| mechanisms in place to protect you, and make their task more
| difficult, like identity theft protection, a home security
| system, a VPN, or even Multi-factor Authentication.
| setgree wrote:
| Hi there,
|
| just signed up for your free service, and wow, it's creepy to see
| my childhood home phone number just sitting there next to my name
| and current address so many times. Three things:
|
| First, I'm looking at your paid plans, and what I actually want
| right now is just to pay $10 to have this current batch taken
| care of, and then I can repeat the process any time I happen to
| think about it. I know that's not what you want as a business,
| and I'm sure it's not what your backers want, but I can't see why
| a monthly subscription service is the right model from a user's
| POV. All I really want is to periodically wipe the slate clean.
|
| Second, I see that you have the most expensive plan labeled as
| "MOST POPULAR," and I'm afraid I just don't believe that that's
| true; and given how much your business relies on trust, something
| about the breeziness/sleaziness of this tactic seems out of
| place.
|
| And third, a general comment -- this seems like a cool idea for a
| company, But I'm surprised YC was interested in it. I personally
| can't see any way that this becomes a billion dollar business, or
| 100 billion, or whatever returns VCs are looking for. But heck,
| if I was able to guess that kind of thing, I'd be out there doing
| it.
|
| Good luck y'all
| cacarbonate wrote:
| thoraway77f wrote:
| istjohn wrote:
| Unfortunately, your second point is just the tip of the sleaze-
| burg. All those sites they showed as having your information
| also seem to have info on "Notareal Personxxx":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30610432
| beyondd wrote:
| This is a product experience defect, and is not intended to
| be deceptive. Several comments have cried "foul" on this one
| and we hear it loud and clear. We apologize this has
| persisted in the product, and can definitely see how this can
| be misleading.
|
| To explain what's happening from the inside, immediately
| after the sign up, we retrofit the profile data you've input
| at the signup process into our URL templates for each data
| broker. This provides an immediately actionable link you can
| click on to see if your profile is present on the other end
| at the data broker. Meanwhile, our automated scanner starts
| running to see if it can actually find your profile at each
| data broker. After about 1 hour, a PDF report is emailed with
| ~70 (on average) places on the web that your profile has been
| found.
|
| What's often really confusing, and that we definitely need to
| fix in the UI, is when the user starts clicking on the links
| and they find "no profile found" they think that something's
| gone wrong, or that we're trying to be deceptive. Even more
| confusing is when a dummy name like "Notareal Personxxx" is
| input, the links are still there for you to click through.
|
| The defect in the product is that the UI assumes a large
| number of matches for each user will be found, typically 50 -
| 100 on average. Everything in the UI is framed up with that
| assumption. However, when there are only a few results, or in
| the extreme case where a fake name is input, and there are no
| results at all, the UI still frames everything up as if it
| were for a typical user with 50 - 100 matched profiles. The
| other reason this product defect has persisted is because our
| Free Basic users use the links to QA their own self-service
| opt out work. So after they've submitted their own opt out,
| they want to be able to click through the link and see that
| the profile is gone. This is why most people use the product
| with glee, but when a link leads to a "page not found", at
| best people are confused, and at worst they cry "foul" of
| deception.
|
| I love Show HN and Launch HN threads because the builders get
| so much rich feedback like this on how to improve the
| product. This is the best feedback that we'll take with us
| and start hammering away on immediately. Thank you!
|
| We do have a Help Desk post describing what's happening with
| these links, but we need to update it and make it more clear
| based on this feedback. You can find a little more
| information on how these links work here:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-leads-
| to-a...
| ivberrOg wrote:
| it's deceptive at step 1, and you're selling trust.
| schemathings wrote:
| It's funny I parsed the dummy name "Notareal Personxxx" as
| 'Notary-something' and thought maybe this was some type of
| legal proxy account.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Sorry I might come across as harsh, but you indicate this
| is a 'defect', at the same time your comment makes clear
| that this is a known issue and you choose to keep it that
| way.
|
| > The other reason this product defect has persisted is
| because our Free Basic users use the links to QA their own
| self-service opt out work.
|
| You can't have it both ways - either admit its intentional
| or change if you know its deceptive.
|
| The whole thread here convinces me that this is neither a
| product that should exist, nor does this startup have the
| users' interests in mind.
| hansvm wrote:
| That might just be a UX issue. If the Exposure Risk Scan were
| instantaneous rather than ~1hr I think (optimistically) that
| the result page wouldn't be misleading as a whole.
|
| That said, I did confirm your observed behavior with securely
| random identifiers (in the off-chance that "Notareal
| Personxxx" is _actually_ sufficiently commonly used for
| testing that it was slurped up by data brokers).
| beyondd wrote:
| Thanks for trying out Optery! It sounds like you got the same
| "Wow" moment most new Optery users describe. Glad to hear!
|
| 1) We do see some people activate their subscription for a few
| months, and then cancel their plan to downgrade back down to
| the Free Basic tier. The Free Basic tier sends ongoing Exposure
| Reports (currently every 3 months), so if they start to see
| more profiles pop back up, they re-activate. There are
| significant benefits to keeping the subscription running on an
| ongoing basis though. For example, we are constantly adding new
| data brokers, so if you keep the service running, you get
| covered for new data brokers automatically as we add them to
| your plan. Sometimes we struggle with a data broker for many
| months, and then get a breakthrough and are able to get a
| waterfall of profiles removed at that data broker. We do
| ongoing monitoring and scans, to find and remove your profiles
| if they pop back up, so they are removed immediately.
|
| 2) The Ultimate plan is our most popular plan by far. It's not
| even close. Second most popular is our Core plan. And Extended
| is our third most popular plan. PCMag recently did a deep dive
| into our space and named Optery their coveted "Editors' Choice"
| as the most outstanding product on the market. Here was their
| summary quote "Optery's handling of the core data removal task
| outshines the rest, and its free tier brings privacy protection
| to those who can't afford expensive subscriptions. In the realm
| of personal data removal, Optery is our Editors' Choice."
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/optery
|
| Optery is the premium product in the space, so it's natural
| that our customers would gravitate to the highest tier plan.
|
| 3) Thank you!
| [deleted]
| opteryqthrow wrote:
| Does your service cover websites that scrape arrest records and
| create pages based off that? I had a public intox arrest that was
| since expunged/sealed, yet the record persists on a lot of pages
| deep in the Google index. Would definitely pay for the removal of
| these listings.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I dont think it will be deep in the google index, if one knows
| where to look
|
| https://www.judyrecords.com/
| wrongnameta wrote:
| They disabled search on the site due to some concerns from
| state AGs, so it's useless at the moment.
| beyondd wrote:
| We submit complaints to the FTC and state attorney generals
| offices for non-compliant data brokers all the time. They
| don't move very fast, but its so great when they finally
| take action. I highly recommend anyone experiencing
| pushback from data brokers to submit complaints to the FTC
| and your state attorney general's office immediately. It
| does help. We have a little more information about this on
| the Optery Help Desk here:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/coverage-limitations-
| for-...
| beyondd wrote:
| Optery isn't designed for this. There are probably some
| "reputation management" companies out there that handle this
| situation. I've heard they can be in the $1,000/mo range in
| cost, but I don't know for sure as that's not our expertise. If
| you have an official government document or statement that
| provides evidence of the expungement / seal, I'd recommend
| contacting the sites directly over email and sending them the
| evidence, and I would expect that most of them would remove the
| information without too much trouble.
| wrongnameta wrote:
| I was excited to see a service like this. I hate data brokers and
| have tried to go to somewhat-great (good?) lengths to obfuscate
| my personal info, including using e-mails that expose services
| selling/giving out my info. I signed up and was surprised to see
| 202 different brokers were offering my info. However, when I
| looked at the "More Info" drop-down on each, I noticed the last
| name was incorrect. So I looked at my profile and noticed I
| misspelled my last name, to a last name I am almost certain does
| not exist.
|
| Even if it somehow existed, to see it with the same first and
| middle name and location just seems way too much of a
| coincidence. Do any of these brokers really have my info or are
| you just showing this false information to help increase
| conversions?
| beyondd wrote:
| Thanks for trying it out. One thing to clarify is that we list
| out each data broker we cover, regardless of whether or not
| your profile was found or not. We do this partly to support our
| Free Basic users that use the data broker links in the
| dashboard to QA and verify their own opt out work (or the opt
| out work of other services).
|
| So just because you see a data broker in your dashboard, does
| not mean we are implying that your profile is there. In fact,
| if you click on any of the links, you'll see we spawn a modal
| that says "External links help with self-service opt outs and
| provide visibility into where your info is posted online, but
| are not always perfect."
|
| My guess is that if you click through any of the links, it will
| lead to pages that say something like "profile not found"
| because it's a name that does not exisit.
|
| We also have an article on our Help Desk that explains what's
| happening, and further below is a snippet that most likely
| explains what you are experiencing:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-leads-to-a...
|
| "What is often confusing is that we display the "View" links
| for every data broker, regardless of whether we find your
| profile at the data broker or not. The "View" links are not
| intended to be perfect matches for your profile. Results will
| vary for each user, depending on your circumstances. Sometimes
| the "View" links are not perfect, and other people may be
| listed, or you might not be there at all, but in most cases,
| they allow you to quickly view a snapshot of where your
| personal details are exposed online."
|
| This question has come up before, so we really need to do a
| better job of ironing out the confusion in the product. Thanks
| so much for the feedback.
| istjohn wrote:
| This is super sketchy. Even the modal you describe is
| misleading:
|
| _> > "External links help with self-service opt outs and
| provide visibility into where your info is posted online, but
| are not always perfect."_
|
| That is 100% misleading when you are linking to every data
| broker regardless of whether or not someone is in their
| database.
| [deleted]
| beyondd wrote:
| The modal spawns when the user has just clicked through to
| a data broker and is about to leave Optery. We have a lot
| of warnings we're trying to convey on this one modal, most
| critically, strongly advising users to never share their
| personal email or pay any money to any data brokers ever.
|
| I can definitely see how this is confusing though to see
| all the links for all the data brokers regardless of
| whether the user has been found or not, and we have a Help
| Desk article on the topic:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-leads-
| to-a...
|
| The primary reason we have this is for our Free Basic users
| who use the links as a mechanism to explore where their
| profile might be exposed and do their self-service opt out
| work. This is great feedback that we need to address this
| and make it more clear in the product. Thank you for the
| feedback.
|
| Below is the full text of the modal:
|
| ================
|
| You Are Leaving Optery
|
| Optery is not affiliated with the site you're being
| redirected to.
|
| External links help with self-service opt outs and provide
| visibility into where your info is posted online, but are
| not always perfect.
|
| When visiting data brokers, we recommend never sharing your
| personal email or paying any data brokers any money.
|
| We then link into our Help Desk article advising users to
| never share their personal email or pay any money to data
| brokers: https://help.optery.com/en/article/do-not-share-
| your-persona...
|
| We then give the user the option to click "Back" and return
| to Optery, or to "Continue".
| hirundo wrote:
| If they _are_ yet another data broker with a novel phishing
| pitch, giving them your info just adds it to one more list among
| many. If they 're legit, they could lower the spam volume by a
| few decibels. Seems like a reasonable risk/benefit ratio.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I think this company itself is legit, at least for now, but the
| risk is that they'll forward this info to 200+ data brokers to
| "opt-out" - would you really trust them to actually opt you
| out, as opposed to opt you in (if you weren't already in there)
| and silently set a flag saying this person is of even more
| interest? If they can tell that the opt-out request comes from
| such a service, this increases the value of your profile even
| more as it's a signal that you might have enough disposable
| income to pay for such a service.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| Do you have data on the efficacy of your solution?
|
| How many fewer spam and phishing attempts do your customers
| receive vs non-customers? What is the rate of successful identity
| theft against your users vs a similarly technical and privacy
| conscience control group?
|
| I love this idea, but you're asking me to spend more money a
| month than many streaming services. To command that type of price
| you're going to need to show actual data on risk reduction and
| not hand wave some claims about spam and phishing. So I wonder
| who your target customer is? For a higher profile person spending
| $300 a year to automate some opsec is trivial. For broader
| consumers perhaps less so, especially without hard data on
| efficacy.
|
| Can you point to quantifiable effects of your service?
| Melatonic wrote:
| Good question - given how this is fairly easy to do yourself
| (although I suppose I did not have TONS of hits) I am not sure
| why I would pay for this monthly.
| dataflow wrote:
| Do you provide any kind of guarantee (perhaps an optional one, at
| the user's request) that you will delete/scrub any & all data you
| gather from/about a user at any particular point in time (say,
| after you're finished opting out everywhere, or after they delete
| their account)? Or will you keep that data indefinitely?
|
| i.e. (how) can you assure users that this isn't yet another
| business actually trying to collect their data? It's kind of hard
| to do that unless you guarantee you will lose any data related to
| them once you've finished performing all the opt-outs on their
| behalf.
| jrockway wrote:
| What a nifty startup. I love the idea of using software to make
| it more difficult to sell my personal information. I'm not sure
| why I care enough to pay, but after reading this post, I do, and
| I signed up. (I'm awaiting my report and will probably upgrade
| after reading it.)
| estaseuropano wrote:
| But this seems to be neither software nor does it actually make
| it more difficult to sell data. Its a servive that sends opt
| out requests for you. As far as I can see there is no legal
| value to this, nor is this sustainable - the next scrape and
| you're back in. There is (obviously) no guarantee that you data
| won't be sold, nor any guarantee that their opt out requests
| don't become basically a signal for 'this is a real person with
| money to spare'.
| jrockway wrote:
| The teeth come from the laws, though. If you've submitted an
| opt-out request in compliance with the law, and your data
| reappears, the vendor now has a problem with the government.
| Problems with the government are super bad for your business.
| They have many more resources than the average individual.
|
| I think that these laws don't have much effect when you
| require individuals to fill out (literally) 200 forms once a
| year. But software is great at filling out 200 forms once a
| year. It's the "missing link" for this kind of law; turning
| the legislature's intent into a regulation that means
| something.
|
| I rarely see things that are really exciting to me on HN and
| that I can immediately start using. For whatever reason, this
| piqued my interest.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I certainly as the reasoning but still this is
| fundamentally a problem that should not exist.
|
| Here's where the service would be actually powerful: if it
| sends you proof if a broker added you within the 12 month
| period and tells you where to file a case against the
| broker.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Looks interesting. What makes Optery different than several
| existing services that do the same thing?
| [deleted]
| novok wrote:
| Have you thought of a family plan for a family and kids all
| living at one address? Also niche organizational plans like
| police departments, law practices, therapists, hospitals, etc? Or
| ones for lawyers, therapists, etc to buy for themselves? I know a
| lot of those people just want their name only associated with
| their professional office addresses, never a home address, and
| their are rating and professional directories that they do want
| to stay on.
|
| Also people trying it out might give fake names to start, you
| should let people be able to change their name in settings vs.
| making it uneditable after signup.
|
| Also another things is email & email domain privacy. Some nerds &
| organizations have an entire domain as their email set that they
| don't want in directories, marketing spam lists, etc either, kind
| of like https://haveibeenpwned.com/
| beyondd wrote:
| We haven't built family plans into our product yet, but in the
| interim, we have been providing 20% off discount codes for
| households of 2 to 3 people, and 25% off discount codes for
| households of 4 people or more. Similar applies for members of
| vulnerable groups and public servants. At this time a separate
| account needs to be created for each household member to ensure
| everyone is covered. This applies to both free and paid plans.
| Feel free to reach out directly, and we'll send you the correct
| code: https://www.optery.com/contact-us/
|
| We don't cover the professional ratings sites and directories
| that people tend to cultivate presences on consciously. We are
| 100% focused on stopping the unwanted posting and selling of
| personal information by data brokers. The full list of sites we
| cover can be found here: https://www.optery.com/pricing/#data-
| brokers-we-cover
|
| If someone signs up for Optery using a fake name, they almost
| certainly will get garbage results. The Exposure Report will
| most likely be empty, and the data broker links will most
| likely lead to "profile not found pages" or incorrect profiles
| (garbage in, garbage out). One thing to clarify is that we list
| out each data broker we cover, regardless of whether your
| profile was found or not. We do this partly to support our Free
| Basic users that use the data broker links in the dashboard to
| QA and verify their own opt out work (or the opt out work of
| other services). However, based on yours and others comments
| here, this is definitely confusing peoples, so we need to fix
| this and make it more clear. Thank you so much for this great
| feedback.
|
| To prevent abuse, to change the name on your account, you'll
| need to reach out to our customer support. We have more info on
| this on the Optery Help Desk here:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/how-can-i-edit-my-name-1t...
|
| You're welcome to use any email you want when you sign up for
| Optery. Email is not a primary key for us when submitting opt
| outs. We do not use the private email address you use when you
| sign up with Optery to submit opt outs. Optery creates our own
| private emails for you that we manage behind the scenes when
| submitting the opt outs.
| novok wrote:
| People put in fake data to check things out and then may
| correct after they've seen more. What I'm saying you should
| let people do that correction vs having to put their actual
| name as an "alternative spelling". You ask for a name upfront
| without letting people explore the product further. It's
| faster and easier to just make another account with their
| wanted name vs. contacting customer support, I don't think
| actually prevents any form of abuse.
| [deleted]
| austinjp wrote:
| "Optery only works for U.S. residents at this time". It would be
| good to have this clearly stated before the user starts the sign-
| up process. It's a dark pattern to permit account creation if you
| can't actually provide a service to some of those signing up.
| dheera wrote:
| How do you compare to OneRep?
| benrapscallion wrote:
| I'm signed up for this service and while I am generally
| satisfied, they have placed some of the most common websites in
| their most expensive tier. If I contact their customer service,
| they write back with a condescending tone.
| beyondd wrote:
| We hate to hear that you had a bad experience with our customer
| support since we take it very seriously and spend a large
| amount of time on it. We love feedback and respond to all
| inquiries, so please don't hesitate to tell us how we can
| improve either here or through our standard support channel,
| and we will definitely act on it: https://help.optery.com/
|
| The pricing tiers have to do with how difficult it is to remove
| consumers from that data broker. Some of the most well-known
| brokers are also the most difficult to opt out, which is why
| they're in the highest priced tier.
|
| Thanks so much for your feedback and for using Optery.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| When you say "most difficult", what exactly does it mean? I
| highly doubt that you are manually conversing with any of
| them.
| EnergyCrush wrote:
| I want to see a response from Optery on this.
| nocommandline wrote:
| 1) Are you getting the data brokers to entirely delete a person's
| information from their records or are you just trying to prevent
| the information from being displayed online? If the latter, then
| this is only half a solution because the data broker can still
| sell your information. If the former, is there any way to
| actually confirm the information has been removed.
|
| 2) How do you handle making sure that you are not 'adding' more
| information to a data broker who already has information about
| you? For example, a friend of mine once found his information
| publicly available on a website on the internet. To remove his
| information from being publicly displayed, the website required
| him to provide a phone number where he would receive a
| confirmation text code that he had to add to the removal request
| form. This essentially means the website now has more information
| (another phone #) about him.
|
| 3) Some of the information these websites display are gathered
| from public government databases like court records, county
| registrations of house sales, etc. I would assume those records
| can't be 'removed' or 'hidden'. Do you have a specific way of
| dealing with such?
| beyondd wrote:
| Great questions!
|
| 1) It really depends on the data broker and the state you live
| in, but the majority are the latter (prevent the info from
| being displayed online). When possible we request full
| deletion, but California residents are really the only ones
| that have firm data deletion rights from the CCPA and are
| typically the only ones that data deletion is even made
| available as an option by the data brokers. We have some new
| product features in development that will increase our ability
| to deliver data deletions though in the future.
|
| Regarding "If the latter, then this is only half a solution
| because the data broker can still sell your information": this
| too is inconsistent. In most cases they will stop selling your
| information after the opt out, but in some cases, though they
| take the profile down from the public web, but may still be
| selling the data behind the scenes, usually to corporate
| buyers.
|
| When the data is represented as deleted by the data broker, we
| don't have a good way to confirm that it has actually been
| deleted unfortunately. We have some ideas though for how to do
| this in the future.
|
| 2) We recommend only submitting the minimum amount of
| information necessary to complete the opt out, which in most
| cases is the minimum amount of information required to sign up
| for Optery (first name, last name, year of birth, current city,
| current state), or sometimes also the URL where your profile
| was found. Many data brokers request a phone number to verify,
| but we recommend never providing them with your real phone
| number. Most of the time, demanding the data broker remove the
| profile and threatening legal action or reporting them to the
| FTC and your state attorney general's office over email will
| induce them to remove the profile without a phone number. If
| data brokers push back on this, we recommend you definitely
| file a complaint with the FTC and your state attorney general
| (we do this frequently). If you do feel you want to provide a
| phone number, we recommend creating a temporary, secondary, or
| disposable phone number. If you do opt outs on your own, we
| also recommend you always use a temporary or secondary email
| address for the submissions, and NEVER use your primary email
| address. We have a post on our Help Desk about this here:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/do-not-share-your-persona...
|
| 3) Definitely there are some data sets that are inherently
| difficult or nearly impossible to remove, e.g. public records,
| voter records, etc. However, we can often get this type of data
| removed from the for-profit web sites that re-publish it. The
| best best thing you can do is submit the opt out request. Some
| will honor it, and some will not. It's hit or miss. The silver
| lining is that most of the web sites that re-publish public
| records usually publish more limited information as opposed to
| other sites that post things like phone number, email address,
| ethnicity, household income, network, family members' names,
| etc.
| STU-UTF wrote:
| I'm parroting the concerns raised by istjohn. Why in the world
| would you make it seem like a free user's exposures are was
| higher than they likely actually are to increase conversion
| opportunities.
|
| Why not provide stronger and better opt out guides like Removaly
| does if you're sincerely trying to help others instead of
| increasing conversion opportunities to pay back your VC funders?
| [deleted]
| sdan wrote:
| paid the full ultimate service, one thing less I have to worry
| about. i didnt think twice
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't see how this can work at a fundamental level.
|
| You're telling me that to remove my info I have to essentially
| give (through your service) all these companies & data brokers my
| info so they can opt me out, and actually trust them that they'll
| do so? If anything, opting out is a signal that you may actually
| be of more interest to them than not doing anything. If these
| companies can also infer that the request is coming from your
| service (and they will, unless you use random proxies and browser
| automation), the flag becomes "this person has enough disposable
| money to pay for such a service" which suddenly increases the
| value of your profile by orders of magnitude.
|
| How are you going to make money to justify the VC funding? VCs
| rarely fund boring, sustainable businesses that sell a service
| and make a slim profit; for them it's all about hypergrowth, but
| I don't see the potential here - unless of course you start doing
| the very thing you're currently protecting against. The simple
| fact that it's VC-funded tells me to steer well clear.
|
| The only proper way to deal with this is with GDPR-like
| regulation and actually enforcing it - the latter has been
| lacking in Europe, but thankfully seems like it's somewhat picked
| up recently.
| troydavis wrote:
| > You're telling me that to remove my info I have to
| essentially give (through your service) all these companies &
| data brokers my info so they can opt me out, and actually trust
| them that they'll do so?
|
| Other people raised that concern when this appeared on HN
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=27668140), and at the
| time, that's indeed what the service did.
|
| Even if one ignores intentional misuse, simple incompetence by
| a data broker seems like enough to cause a problem. It only
| takes one data broker to commingle fields from opt-out requests
| with existing data (and then share/sell/trade that existing
| data) for the opt-out fields to spread.
| beyondd wrote:
| That's certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look
| at it is that if you do nothing, you information will
| continue to persist, multiply, and propagate unchecked. Those
| that take the time (or money) to remove the profiles, have
| dramatically reduced online footprints, which is why these
| types of services are becoming more and more popular. Many
| companies are starting to mandate their employees use
| services like ours to strengthen their security posture to
| reduce exposure to phishing, hacking, email spam, etc.
| troydavis wrote:
| I'm all for spending the time or money to remove my
| profile. I'd rather also spend a little extra time to see
| where I'm listed and evaluate that organization, though.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| > you[sic] information will continue to persist, multiply,
| and propagate unchecked
|
| Based on how the underlying problem is presented in your
| own business model, it seems like this will happen
| regardless of whether a customers uses this service or not.
| Like conscripting a recruit into a losing battle (and
| arguably an unwinnable war) at cost to oneself with little
| specificity as to what qualifies as success.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Can you give an example of a company that mandates this?
| beyondd wrote:
| Anyone can submit opt outs, with, or without, a service like
| ours. The vast majority of data brokers do remove the
| information after an opt out request is submitted.
| Unfortunately, over time, many data brokers start adding it
| back. The CCPA (California's Privacy Law) permits a data broker
| to stop honoring an opt out after 12 months.
|
| To answer your question though, yes, in order to get these
| companies to remove your info, you have to submit an opt out
| that identifies who you are. There is a catch-22, otherwise,
| they would not know who to opt out.
|
| There are a multitude of reasons why people submit opt outs
| beyond whether or not the person can pay, e.g. victims of
| domestic violence, police officers, public figures, government
| officials, members of the military, etc. The data brokers are
| aware of this and generally have processes to accommodate the
| requests.
|
| Millions of people use some form of identity protection to
| protect themselves from identity theft, email spam, phishing,
| scams, hacking, etc. It is a multi-billion dollar market across
| the consumer, business, and government levels.
|
| I do agree that we need stronger privacy laws in the U.S. ASAP!
| akudha wrote:
| _The CCPA (California 's Privacy Law) permits a data broker
| to stop honoring an opt out after 12 months._
|
| Does this mean users have to keep opting out every 12 months?
| If yes, that sounds...dumb, isn't it? Maybe I am not
| understanding this correctly, is there a reason behind this
| 12 month period? Even if they wanted to let data brokers add
| the data back, 12 months seems too short a time. What am I
| missing?
|
| Why is every bad thing opt out instead of opt in? This is so
| backwards...
| beyondd wrote:
| Here's the exact text from Section 1798.135(a)(5) of the
| CCPA: "For a consumer who has opted-out of the sale of the
| consumer's personal information, respect the consumer's
| decision to opt-out for at least 12 months before
| requesting that the consumer authorize the sale of the
| consumer's personal information."
|
| Data brokers can often have a very liberal interpretation
| of what it means for the consumer to "authorize" the sale
| of their personal information. I would guess 99% of data
| sales were never actually "authorized" by the consumer to
| begin with, and are usually done through some backdoor
| implicit authorization that the consumer has no knowledge
| of whatsoever.
|
| > Does this mean users have to keep opting out every 12
| months? If yes, that sounds...dumb, isn't it? Maybe I am
| not understanding this correctly, is there a reason behind
| this 12 month period? Even if they wanted to let data
| brokers add the data back, 12 months seems too short a
| time. What am I missing?
|
| Although it often causes harm and is often considered evil,
| there is a lot of economic value that results from the free
| flow of data. U.S. lawmakers recognize this and its partly
| why they're so reluctant to pass strict privacy laws like
| they have in Europe. The other reason is that lobbyists for
| deep pocketed tech companies water down privacy laws
| significantly before they can pass. Even with the 12 month
| expiration, the CCPA is the strictest privacy law in the
| U.S., and most U.S. citizens have basically no data privacy
| rights whatsoever.
|
| How long a data broker honors an opt out is highly variable
| by the data broker. But yes, in general, you have to
| continue monitoring these companies and re-submitting opt
| out requests over time, that's what Optery does with its
| ongoing scanning and removal technology. We have a little
| more info on this topic here:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/when-my-data-is-
| removed-f...
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Lobbying. That's the reason. There is no rational reason
| why a user's explicitly expressed preference would become
| irrelevant after a year.
|
| The organ donor database won't ask you every month to
| verify that you still want to do it - there is nil
| legitimate reason why this would be 'needed' in this case.
| lizard wrote:
| Not in California, but spent some time several years ago
| working on the tech for a sales arm.
|
| My impression there was that people where pretty conscious
| of opt-outs and wanting to manage them carefully, if only
| because the consequences of not doing so could be costly.
| We spent a lot of time talking about opt-outs and trying to
| honor them across different tools they used.
|
| Many prospects came from purchased lists. Some were
| contracts where some other firm was specifically handling a
| marketing campaign for us, but others were clearly just
| purchased from a data broker who, presumably, filtered
| their data for people who indicated an interest in us.
|
| When we asked how to handle these, the decision was that if
| you showed up on one of these lists, you had opted in.
| After all, that is what the broker told us.
|
| This presents the first problem: If you buy data from a
| broker who you have not specifically engaged to campaign on
| your behalf, its a little gray what that data actually
| represents. This may be resolved by probing into to
| broker's collection and segmentation more, but as far as I
| can tell there's not a lot of incentive for the decision
| makers to care.
|
| Anyways, I was not particularly thrilled with this
| approach, especially after working with some lists we
| purchased several times a year that always had a
| significant number of duplicates time after time. So I
| wrote that particular import to check for duplicates and
| filter them out.
|
| Well, this worked great until the prospects, having no
| recent activity, grew stale and were cleaned from the
| system. Then when they showed up in the list again wouldn't
| match and get a fresh new subscription.
|
| Which presents the second problem: If you don't hold on to
| their identifiable information, you cannot determine if
| they have previously requested to be removed from your
| offerings. So it may be dumb to have to opt out again, bit
| the alternative is to trust them not to use your
| information in the mean time.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| > Which presents the second problem: If you don't hold on
| to their identifiable information, you cannot determine
| if they have previously requested to be removed from your
| offerings. So it may be dumb to have to opt out again,
| bit the alternative is to trust them not to use your
| information in the mean time.
|
| This is just false. You can opt to keep e.g. a hash to
| check against future additions. Else you also would not
| be able to comply with the 12 month requirement.
| lizard wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the rules for data brokers or if
| Optery is able to compel anyone to actually delete
| things, especially if they claim not to not have a way to
| prevent reentry. The platforms I worked with all handled
| opt-outs with a "Has Opted Out" indicator that could be
| filtered, in particular on distribution, and deleting
| profiles was a separate concern with the only crossover
| that they must be kept long enough to honor opt-out
| requirements.
|
| Personal profiles are messy. People have different names,
| addresses, email, phone numbers, and different people
| sharing any of the aforementioned details. This is
| complicated enough with the raw data and unless you have
| a very simple profiles or opt-out rules, such as treating
| the entire household as one, you're going to need more
| than a simple hash to figure out if there is existing
| opt-out history.
|
| Profiles may also need to be kept for transactional
| purposes. Presumably, data brokers and people who have
| only heard of you through brokers wouldn't have any
| transactional activity. But everyone else likely needs to
| deal with opt-outs on the distribution side, making opt-
| outs a solved problem that doesn't need to happen on
| intake.
|
| So...sure, you can.
|
| But I wouldn't hold your breath that this will be seen as
| a reasonable expectation for most developers or
| businesses to implement.
| mawise wrote:
| > in order to get these companies to remove your info, you
| have to submit an opt out that identifies who you are.
|
| I wonder if you could build an opt-out service or protocol
| where you share a hash of your personal information instead
| of the info itself. With the hash you can identify matching
| records but you cannot create a record from the hash.
|
| If Optery bought full datasets from databrokers, it could use
| a hash to identify matching records and submit those back to
| the brokers for opt-out (this wouldn't work for querying
| their public APIs...)
|
| Probably not a feasible solution, but it's a fun possibility
| to think about!
| joering2 wrote:
| > With the hash you can identify matching records but you
| cannot create a record from the hash.
|
| I always chuckle when I see someone saying this. A buddy of
| mine (email marketer) tried to convince me that his 50
| million large email database is "well protected" because
| they are using "industry standard md5 encryption". Of
| course its not encryption but rather hashing. He was so
| sure of his, erm, encryption, that he send me the whole
| database and said "here, crack it".
|
| I found a large hacked Facebook email database online, run
| few python scripts to weed us most combinations of
| usernames (name+numbers, numbers+name, numbers+some random
| chars, etc) and some 1000 generic email domains names (like
| gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc). It took my regular i9 five days
| to go thru the whole 50M of md5s and compare each
| combination of usernames + domains names. Oh boy his shock
| when I returned some 70% "unencrypted" plain text emails
| back to him :)
|
| Bottom line is, if there is some "industry standard" of
| hashing data, then there are ways to unhash it. Yes in many
| cases it may be in millions of years to circle thru all
| possibilities, but if your standard is first name + last
| name + email address (and all caps), then you can easily
| plug database of names and download millions of email
| records online and narrow down your hashing search greatly.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| What's the point? The company a you are asking to remove
| data will anyway know which dataset you asked to delete.
|
| What would work would be a mandatory self block list (e.g.
| most EU countries have a 'do not call' opt-in list against
| telemarketers) and then the brokers have to check any new
| days against the hash of data points in this block list.
| But that requires government intervention, not startups
| that bandaid the problem.
| kirso wrote:
| I think it can be a great service but have the same question
| as above.
|
| Why did you opt-out for VC? This seems to be a perfect
| candidate for a profitable and sustainable business because
| you don't really need a complicated infra or another 2 years
| to build an enterprise grade product. (unless I am missing
| something).
|
| Thank you!
| striking wrote:
| > I have to essentially give (through your service) all these
| companies & data brokers my info
|
| Happy user of Optery here: you don't have to give Optery a
| whole lot of info. No SSNs or anything, just things they would
| search by to help you remove them. Are there fields for past
| addresses or people you lived with or past names you may have
| had? Sure. Do you have to fill them out? No. Are they provided
| in bulk to the data brokers? No.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| So they will enter all this data on the websites of the
| brokers which sell such data....this reminds me of the
| website that promises it contains all/most bitcoin private
| keys - just enter yours to find out if its there!
| throw10920 wrote:
| > You're telling me that to remove my info I have to
| essentially give (through your service) all these companies &
| data brokers my info
|
| How can you index into a hashmap, an array, or a DB table
| without a key? Answer: you cannot.
|
| There's _no way_ for data-broker opt-outs to work without
| uniquely identifying the individual who wishes to be removed.
|
| Sure, I agree that "GDPR-like regulation and actually enforcing
| it" is the proper solution - but how long will that take? Five
| years? Ten?
|
| What if I want my personal data removed from these brokers
| _now?_
|
| Edit: now that I think about it - you could build some scheme
| where you give the data-brokers a cryptographic hash of some
| personally-identifying information, so if they don't already
| have you in their database, then they can't get your
| information. But, in order to do that, you'd need regulation
| equivalent to the GDPR (otherwise they'd never do it), in which
| case the above argument still applied.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| I wish your company success.
|
| Feedback from a privacy conscious person - I would not use such a
| service because their is nothing stopping you becoming a
| aggregator of data brokers. Now you have additional information
| such as my IP and payment information, which can connect all data
| into one giant profile.
| Farfromthehood wrote:
| I have a paid premium subscription with optery. I provided them
| with minimal informed and have been pleased thus far.
|
| Good customer service. Fairly quick response time.
|
| For years, I've performed monthly searches on my name and
| naturally submit opt-out requests from whatever data brokers I
| found.
|
| I signed up for optery using a couple discounts from stack social
| (or one of those sites).
|
| They found DOZENS of listings under my name. I was surprised+
| pissed, but optery has manager to remove most of them. They send
| a quarterly(?) PDF update containing before and after screenshots
| of days brokers where my info was once displayed.
|
| I still perform my monthly searches and report any findings to
| optery. They've been receptive and apologetic whenever I find my
| info online.
|
| That's my review. Ask questions if you want.
| istjohn wrote:
| Just hijacking the top comment to point out that Optery's
| onboarding process is deliberately misleading in an attempt to
| get you to subscribe to a paid tier.
|
| I signed up as "Notareal Personxxx." I listed my city as
| "Detroit, MI." I'm shown a list of 202 domains under the
| heading "Websites exposing your personal information." I click
| "More information" next to one of the listed websites. A modal
| appears:
|
| >> Notareal Personxxxx, Detroit, MI,
|
| <Yes, that's me> <No, I'm not there>
|
| See screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/Z2M8y3d
| beyondd wrote:
| This is a product experience defect, and not intended to be
| deceptive. Several comments have cried "foul" on this one and
| we hear it loud and clear. We apologize this has persisted in
| the product, and can definitely see how this can be
| misleading.
|
| To explain what's happening from the inside, immediately
| after the sign up, we retrofit the profile data you've input
| at the signup process into our URL templates for each data
| broker. This provides an immediately actionable link you can
| click on to see if your profile is present on the other end
| at the data broker. Meanwhile, our automated scanner starts
| running to see if it can actually find your profile at each
| data broker. After about 1 hour, a PDF report is emailed with
| ~70 (on average) places on the web that your profile has been
| found.
|
| What's often really confusing, and that we definitely need to
| fix in the UI, is when the user starts clicking on the links
| and they find "no profile found" they think that something's
| gone wrong, or that we're trying to be deceptive. Even more
| confusing is when a dummy name like "Notareal Personxxx" is
| input, the links are still there for you to click through.
|
| The defect in the product is that the UI assumes a large
| number of matches for each user will be found, typically 50 -
| 100 on average. Everything in the UI is framed up with that
| assumption. However, when there are only a few results, or in
| the extreme case where a fake name is input, and there are no
| results at all, the UI still frames everything up as if it
| were for a typical user with 50 - 100 matched profiles. The
| other reason this product defect has persisted is because our
| Free Basic users use the links to QA their own self-service
| opt out work. So after they've submitted their own opt out,
| they want to be able to click through the link and see that
| the profile is gone. This is why most people use the product
| with glee, but when a link leads to a "page not found", at
| best people are confused, and at worst they cry "foul" of
| deception.
|
| I love Show HN and Launch HN threads because the builders get
| so much rich feedback like this on how to improve the
| product. This is the best feedback that we'll take with us
| and start hammering away on immediately. Thank you!
|
| We do have a Help Desk post describing what's happening with
| these links, but we need to update it and make it more clear
| based on this feedback. You can find a little more
| information on how these links work here:
|
| https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-leads-
| to-a...
| motoxpro wrote:
| Pretty sure you are not the only person to ever say my name
| is "Notareal Personxxxx" in detroit. The internet is a very
| large place and has been around for a pretty long time at
| this point with billions of people entering "real" info into
| forms all over the world every day. If just one person did it
| before you, and that one persons info got collected and sold,
| you have the situation you are seeing.
|
| No comment on if the service is real or whatever, just that
| your "test" is flawed.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Your homepage pulls something off: facebook.net
| googletagmanager.com profitwell.com hotjar.com
|
| Ain't that some potent irony.
| beyondd wrote:
| We've been testing ads on Facebook, even though we don't love
| their privacy track record. But what Facebook and Google do
| with ads targeting, is very different than what the people
| search and data broker sites do posting and selling people's
| email, phone number, IP address, home address, political party,
| ethnicity, etc in plain text on the web.
|
| Profitwell helps us with revenue reporting and metrics, Hotjar
| helps us improve our user experience, and Google Tag Manager
| makes the delivery of these vendor's tags a little easier.
|
| We disclose the third party vendors we use here:
| https://www.optery.com/how-we-secure-your-data/
| tacLog wrote:
| Would you consider not loading facebook and google for logged
| in users? I understand there is a difference but your selling
| privacy.
| [deleted]
| mazlix wrote:
| I think you're being a bit hard on them... The FB and GTM are
| likely to track how well their ads are converting users - it's
| reasonable for them to advertise to try to get this service
| infront of your eyeballs. Facebook doesn't sell user data, just
| uses it for (selling) advertising.
|
| Hotjar is great for providing heatmaps to see what parts of
| their site are working/ not I mean sure it's tracking you but
| only on that site AFAIK?
|
| Now I'm not familiar with profitwell, but just seems like a
| basic CRM.
|
| I think there's a pretty big difference between this basic
| Marketing SaaS tools / advertising conversion tracking and
| doing something like collecting your personal real life data
| and making it easy for anyone to search/dox you online.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| You must be joking. A bit hard on them?
|
| They sell removal of personal information off the Internet,
| and yet they feed tracking data on their visitors to
| companies _directly_ responsible for nearly complete
| evisceration of personal online privacy.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| You are right, these scrips could only be loaded after user
| consent.
| mazlix wrote:
| I may be in the minority, but I make a distinction between
| personal IRL information like searching my name reveals my
| phone number or address. And online tracking information
| like when I have this cookie or browse from this IP, show
| me more X. Also Facebook is a large responsible company (no
| major data breaches, etc.) I know they're hated on, but
| something like Equifax is several orders of magnitude worse
| in my opinion.
|
| Facebook (and maybe Google?) buy data about me to try to
| match me online so they can provide ads on their own
| service, but they don't reveal my data to anyone else -
| advertisers don't get my phone number or physical address
| or even email from them, when they want to advertise to me.
|
| The companies that optery seems to be fighting against are
| ones that post my physical address and phone number and
| family members and name online in one spot so anyone can
| find it, without me ever opting in to that.
| [deleted]
| not1ofU wrote:
| >> Also Facebook is a large responsible company (no major
| data breaches, etc.)
|
| First result for: "facebook data breach"
|
| "Data from 533 million people in 106 countries was
| published on a hacking forum earlier this month. Facebook
| said the data was old, from a previously reported leak in
| 2019. It has denied any wrongdoing, saying that the data
| was scraped from publicly available information on the
| site."
|
| Dated: April 20th 2021
|
| There was 100% phone numbers linked to real names and
| email addresses (at a minimum) in that breach. That may
| not be what you would consider to be major, however.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Sounds like a new competitor to DeleteMe.
| beyondd wrote:
| Optery does compete with DeleteMe. There's some info on how
| Optery is different than DeleteMe here:
|
| https://www.optery.com/introducing-optery-remove-yourself-fr...
|
| PCMag also compared Optery and DeleteMe in their review here:
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/optery
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > Abine's DeleteMe was among the first services to help users
| escape the clutches of online data brokers. Like Privacy Bee,
| it relies on human agents to keep the removals going smoothly
| and handle any tasks that can't be automated.
|
| Does Optery not rely on human agents, like Privacy Bee and
| Delete Me?
| tstegart wrote:
| Can you delete my old HN comments?
| striking wrote:
| You can have your old HN comments deleted by emailing the mods.
| There's limits to how much they'll delete, but they definitely
| don't want you to get into trouble over something you posted on
| HN.
| na85 wrote:
| >There's limits to how much they'll delete
|
| Yes it's a huge problem. Many of us (or maybe just me?) would
| not have been so candid on HN had we known our comments would
| be indelibly preserved forever with no option for deletion.
|
| The stated reasons for this policy I've seen from 'dang
| amount to "we don't like the look of a bunch of comment
| chains with [deleted] everywhere" which I find insulting.
|
| I have a suspicion that the real reason is that the site
| software conveniently doesn't have a mass-deletion function.
| striking wrote:
| They are perfectly able to add features to the site, and
| would absolutely add a feature if they thought it was as
| important as you think this one is.
|
| I get the feeling you've never actually attempted to engage
| with them in good faith, because they're willing to put in
| quite a lot of work to dissociate you from your comments
| while leaving the comment intact. In case you missed it,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 is linked
| from the FAQ.
| na85 wrote:
| > They are perfectly able to add features to the site,
| and would absolutely add a feature if they thought it was
| as important as you think this one is.
|
| I mean we're talking about the forum software that can't
| handle more than a few hundred comments without resorting
| to pagination, so I feel justified in my thesis that
| engineering hours going into HN are pretty limited.
| striking wrote:
| Again, you're not doing much to convince me you've
| actually gone out of your way to have a conversation with
| them.
|
| They have other fish to fry, because maintaining a
| community doesn't just mean maintaining a codebase. They
| have a bunch of existing code that is architected in a
| way that makes some changes (like removing the comment
| render limit) not so easy. Though some of the
| consequences are annoying, they've never stopped anyone
| from using HN.
|
| My personal experience is that they are implementing
| features and doing experiments, and it seems to me you've
| just never bothered to reach out and check with them
| because you think you know better.
|
| Enjoy your thesis, or whatever. They're nice people and I
| recommend emailing them.
| tstegart wrote:
| Thank you, I appreciate that.
| hld wrote:
| Hi!
|
| As a EU citizen who spent weeks sending GDPR requests back and
| worth with several data brokers I know just what a pain it is to
| get some data deleted. Even if it was only "trivial" stuff like
| things I have shopped for online (I always requested the data
| they had before requesting that they delete it) it was a
| laborious process.
|
| I have two questions for you guys:
|
| 1) As a EU citizen do I benefit from signing up to your site or
| are the data brokers you are targeting focused on US citizens?
|
| 2) Why the monthly recurring fee? I would gladly make a higher
| one off payment every now and then for the removal of my data. Or
| is it monthly because you are keeping track if any of my data
| shows up at some point and then immediately remove it?
| beyondd wrote:
| Great to hear you are fighting the good fight to protect your
| data!
|
| To answer your question - NO - there is no benefit to signing
| up for Optery if you do not have a presence in the U.S. The
| only benefit would be that we will notify you in the future
| when we begin offering our service in your country. This
| sentence is buried in the post above "Optery is only for U.S.
| residents for the time being, and this is one main reasons--the
| problem is at its worst here."
|
| The reasons the service is charged on an ongoing recurring fee
| are:
|
| 1) We are constantly adding new data brokers, so if you keep
| the service running, you get covered for new data brokers as we
| add them to your plan.
|
| 2) We do ongoing monitoring and scans, to find and remove your
| profiles if they pop back up. Unfortunately, over time, many
| data brokers start adding it back. The CCPA (California's
| Privacy Law) permits a data broker to stop honoring an opt out
| after 12 months. After opting out, many data brokers actually
| display a message apologizing in advance admitting that
| sometimes their opt out records are over-written by accident
| which might cause your data to reappear.
| tobylane wrote:
| Are you able to use the internal processes these companies
| made in response to gdpr? I wonder what happens if you copy a
| "delete/send your data on me according to your
| responsibilities in the EU" form letter and send it from a US
| address to an international company.
| teeceetime2 wrote:
| Seems very useful. However, I am not a fan of a subscription-
| based model for this sort of thing. I would hands down sign up if
| it was a one-time transaction. If that were the case I would also
| likely be a repeat customer every year.
| beyondd wrote:
| We do see people activate the subscription for a few months,
| and then cancel their plan to downgrade back down to the Free
| Basic tier. The Free Basic tier sends ongoing Exposure Reports,
| so if they start to see more profiles pop back up, they re-
| activate. Others activate the subscription for a few months,
| then cancel, and then completely delete their account, and we
| destroy all info we have about the user at that point.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I'm pretty happy with the service, and even the top tier is
| affordable.
| randerson wrote:
| How can we find out where these Data Brokers get our data from,
| so we can know which companies to avoid?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| consumer451 wrote:
| Looks very interesting, but per HN norms I have a bit of a
| tangential question.
|
| Is there a service which will remove medical debt which is beyond
| the statute of limitations?
|
| This is a simple process to do manually. I have done it myself.
|
| Look up my credit report, find old[0] medical debt, find the
| originating state's statute of limitations on medical debt,
| dispute the charge citing the appropriate statute.
|
| Poof, medical debt gone. Credit improved.
|
| This is so simple, unless regulations prevent this service, it
| must already exist, correct?
|
| [0] Meaning of "old" varies by US State. CA=4yrs, FL=5yrs
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I have no opinion on the service itself, but the very concept
| that such a service is 'needed' just is wild. Have we reached a
| peak of capitalism where I have to pay someone monthly to check
| x/year who is selling my data?
|
| Seems that the law needs to be changed urgently from "right to
| lot out" to "automatically delete data within x months of
| collection".
|
| What is the purpose and added value to society of these brokers?
| Why do we allow such businesses to exist at all? And with all the
| GDPR-bashing on HN, is the existence of optery and similar
| services not proof enough that it is needed?
| kieloo wrote:
| This looks very useful. Is it available in the US only or in
| other countries as well?
| dang wrote:
| From the text above: "Optery is only for U.S. residents for the
| time being" - sorry that wasn't obvious (it's my editing
| failure).
| culi wrote:
| If anyone's interested in alternatives, one of their main
| competitors, Removaly, openly maintains a list of all the players
| in the field:
|
| https://removaly.com/category/comparisons/
|
| Both Removaly and Optery are pretty solid, but if you want
| something your friends and family can actually afford, then
| nothing beats EasyOptOuts.
|
| $20 a year and they're pretty good at what they do. The only
| catch is that while services like Removaly do daily scans (no
| other player in this game does it at that high of a frequency)
| EOO only does a removal every 4 months or so. Regardless, the
| vast majority of sites don't re-add people so even if you only
| get scanned once it'll make a huge difference
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