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I've considered working on this problem from a business standpoint, but I couldn't figure out a good business model for it. I don't think too many people will p

by jameslk 10y ago

I've considered working on this problem from a business standpoint, but I couldn't figure out a good business model for it. I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services. My guess is that they would sign up for a month and after their information has been removed, immediately cancel their subscription until they needed to do it again. And a yearly fee seemed like it would cost too much for mass adoption. There's also the problem that you'll often need to get the customer to "opt out" by providing their own information to verify they own it or they will need to click on a link from an email or receive an SMS text verification code. This gets really messy as an automated service.

samstave 10y ago
What about letting a user enter all their pertinent details, then having a "NUKE ME" button and it would eval how many sites and places to nuke from, and you base your costs to the user based on the effort to nuke the info you find. Then give a very straightforward list to the user and let them select which site/item they want to nuke and provide an upfront cost to them. * You're found on sites 1, 2, 3 * Nuking site 1 is $10.00 * 2 is $1.50 * 3 is $22.55 --- Or something like that?
- Dotnaught 10y ago
  Offering a reward that rises in proportion to the number of sites with your personal information might just provide an incentive to create more such sites. The more you'd pay for privacy, the more it would be worth to violate it.
  - samstave 10y ago
    Game theory on your comment, sure... but I was just referring to "price per record/line item" -- how to separate these???
web007 10y ago
I used to work for https://www.reputationdefender.com/privacy https://www.reputationdefender.com/privacy - that is (was) exactly their business model. One of the big selling points was the time savings, where it would take you 80 hours a week or some crazy number if you did it yourself, filling out forms and keeping up with all of the new services that aggregate and sell this stuff. Doing it once is great, but won't help you after that month - all of the same places that initially sent all your data in to the aggregators are just going to do it again next month, so you'll get a new record all over again. They have largely pivoted since then, into a service primarily for reviews and feedback management. I don't have any insight into the quality of the existing service on either side.
ssully 10y ago
People, like myself, pay a monthly fee for credit monitoring services. A lot of these services will identify if personal information of yours is publicly available on the web. I only know of Instant Checkmate because my fiancé uses Mint Credit Monitoring and they notified her that her info was available on that site. I promptly helped her opt out of the site. I would have loved if Mint just had a 'Help me purge my info from this site' button, because I felt dirty just having to confirm my Fiancés info was on that site and then go through their process to remove it.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
It's possible that the business could be so successful that everyone uses it, the services selling this information all run out of customers and go out of business, none of them come up with newer and more evil ways to do this, and you run out of potential customers. In which case: mission accomplished, retire on your giant pile of money and bask in the knowledge that you made a far better place. (Avoid scenarios in which you have perverse incentives to allow the problem to continue.) But in the meantime, tens of millions of potential customers times any reasonable fee seems more than enough to build a substantial business on. You could tempt people in with a cheap fee to let them send in a few pictures of junk mail and stop those. (As you get more, find the biggest sources and automate or batch them so that they cost you almost nothing, which will pay for the higher-effort ones. Have an upper bound on effort expended, and tell people that they don't pay if you can't remove them.) You could then track down the underlying sources, and if you successfully identify them, contact the customer, and give them enough information to decide to pay you for a higher-end service to get them removed from those sources (and keep them removed). The value that gets people to keep paying you would be a steady stream of reports of "we found this source leaking/selling your information, here's what we did about it". It'll take you years to track down all such sources and find paths to remove them; you will likely end up having to fund some legal work and possibly even a lawsuit or two, which will give you a giant pile of publicity. (As one example of something much easier for a company optimized for the process to do than an individual: the USPS has a detailed process for formally putting a company on notice for mailing someone who has specifically unsubscribed, and that process ends in massive fines for continued mailing to that person. I read a report of someone doing that to stop receiving persistent Dell catalogs.) If you're sufficiently creative, you could even pitch this as a service to marketing companies. You have a list of people who will not buy anything via direct mail, and who will despise any company that they receive such mail from. Convince the sources of postal spam that removing those people from their list makes the rest of their list more valuable. Convince the downstream customers of those sources that using your list directly is far more convenient for them than dealing with opt-outs from every individual on it. That also gives people a continued incentive to pay to remain on that list.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  >"the USPS has a detailed process for formally putting a company on notice for mailing someone who has specifically unsubscribed, and that process ends in massive fines for continued mailing to that person." I am doubting this is enforced in any meaningful way. I don't doubt there is a well-detailed process however the US Post Office's bread and butters seems to be Dell Catalogs and Southwest Airlines credit card offers. This fact is what killed Outbox: http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/ http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-off...
shshhdhs 10y ago
What about pay-per-record? If you identify 100 records? You could charge $50 (50 cents per record, as an example). Shows the value versus a blanket annual fee. The price-per-record could be reduced for the more records they have, or capped at $100 or something.
npezolano 10y ago
Why not structure the company as a public benefit corporation or a non-profit?
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  > Why not structure the company as a public benefit corporation or a non-profit? This seems like a good idea; I'd happily support such an endeavor.
SomeCollegeBro 10y ago
Well, there could be a possible solution to your first problem: offer both a high priced one-time removal attempt, or a recurring subscription with a minimum contractual obligation (6 months for example).
Sunset 10y ago
What about a better business idea. Accept cryptocurrency to shut down these aggregating and re-selling services. Physically, by any means necessary. ANY.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Obligatory reference to https://cryptome.org/ap.htm https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
bogomipz 10y ago
>"I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services." I would be interested in hearing what are you basing this on? Did you do some market research? My feeling is that there is money in privacy, people seem to have no problem paying 5 or 10 dollars a month for a VPN provider for instance.
- jameslk 10y ago
  I can't remember the exact reasons since it was something I was researching a couple years ago. I saw a few competing services that offered annual plans in the $50-$100 range and I think I divided that by 12 and then imagined what would happen when people got most of the value out of the service on first use. It seems to be a very niche market and I'm not sure how much of a pain point it really is to that niche. I had some other ideas to differentiate, which were a bit of a gray-area hack. This included pulling from the same data sources that Spokeo and similar services use to be able to search for that data. That way, the user wouldn't have to enter any personal information other than say an email address. You could then offer a free service that let users enter their email address and they would find all the sites you've crawled where you found their information (similar to haveibeenpwned.com), with an upsell to automatically remove it. Once a subscriber was signed up or previously had used the free service and hadn't opted out, I would keep crawling services for additional data and then give them a warning email when their data popped up again. It seemed like a semi-reasonable business model at the time, but just a really small market, and I had other business ideas I wanted to pursue.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    Interesting points. I wonder if giving the customer visibility into events like "you data was successfully removed from X" would make a difference? Similar to peeking at your Spam folder now and again to see that it is working for you. Also about the market size I imagine the market is just US? It seems other places, at leas Europe anyway has better laws to protect against these kinds of invasive services.
ccvannorman 10y ago
>I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services. $5-10 a month right here, and I am not rich (yet). Time is valuable. My offer goes up with assurances/contingencies if my name is still on the lists/I am affected (e.g. LifeLock's $1M backing guarantee).
EmielMols 10y ago
You could always "enhance" the business case by selling "whitelisting" to some of these data collection services. Just ask the guy from adblock plus.
gcb0 10y ago
why would people pay for the opposite of what they daily work on at Facebook for free: sharing their private life. the new generation grew up with spam and giving out private info like there's no tomorrow. I may sound like a pessimist, but try to talk to any 14-16 year old and see for yourself.

by jameslk 10y ago

samstave 10y ago

What about letting a user enter all their pertinent details, then having a "NUKE ME" button and it would eval how many sites and places to nuke from, and you base your costs to the user based on the effort to nuke the info you find. Then give a very straightforward list to the user and let them select which site/item they want to nuke and provide an upfront cost to them. * You're found on sites 1, 2, 3 * Nuking site 1 is $10.00 * 2 is $1.50 * 3 is $22.55 --- Or something like that?

Dotnaught 10y ago
Offering a reward that rises in proportion to the number of sites with your personal information might just provide an incentive to create more such sites. The more you'd pay for privacy, the more it would be worth to violate it.
- samstave 10y ago
  Game theory on your comment, sure... but I was just referring to "price per record/line item" -- how to separate these???

web007 10y ago

I used to work for https://www.reputationdefender.com/privacy https://www.reputationdefender.com/privacy - that is (was) exactly their business model. One of the big selling points was the time savings, where it would take you 80 hours a week or some crazy number if you did it yourself, filling out forms and keeping up with all of the new services that aggregate and sell this stuff. Doing it once is great, but won't help you after that month - all of the same places that initially sent all your data in to the aggregators are just going to do it again next month, so you'll get a new record all over again. They have largely pivoted since then, into a service primarily for reviews and feedback management. I don't have any insight into the quality of the existing service on either side.

ssully 10y ago

People, like myself, pay a monthly fee for credit monitoring services. A lot of these services will identify if personal information of yours is publicly available on the web. I only know of Instant Checkmate because my fiancé uses Mint Credit Monitoring and they notified her that her info was available on that site. I promptly helped her opt out of the site. I would have loved if Mint just had a 'Help me purge my info from this site' button, because I felt dirty just having to confirm my Fiancés info was on that site and then go through their process to remove it.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

It's possible that the business could be so successful that everyone uses it, the services selling this information all run out of customers and go out of business, none of them come up with newer and more evil ways to do this, and you run out of potential customers. In which case: mission accomplished, retire on your giant pile of money and bask in the knowledge that you made a far better place. (Avoid scenarios in which you have perverse incentives to allow the problem to continue.) But in the meantime, tens of millions of potential customers times any reasonable fee seems more than enough to build a substantial business on. You could tempt people in with a cheap fee to let them send in a few pictures of junk mail and stop those. (As you get more, find the biggest sources and automate or batch them so that they cost you almost nothing, which will pay for the higher-effort ones. Have an upper bound on effort expended, and tell people that they don't pay if you can't remove them.) You could then track down the underlying sources, and if you successfully identify them, contact the customer, and give them enough information to decide to pay you for a higher-end service to get them removed from those sources (and keep them removed). The value that gets people to keep paying you would be a steady stream of reports of "we found this source leaking/selling your information, here's what we did about it". It'll take you years to track down all such sources and find paths to remove them; you will likely end up having to fund some legal work and possibly even a lawsuit or two, which will give you a giant pile of publicity. (As one example of something much easier for a company optimized for the process to do than an individual: the USPS has a detailed process for formally putting a company on notice for mailing someone who has specifically unsubscribed, and that process ends in massive fines for continued mailing to that person. I read a report of someone doing that to stop receiving persistent Dell catalogs.) If you're sufficiently creative, you could even pitch this as a service to marketing companies. You have a list of people who will not buy anything via direct mail, and who will despise any company that they receive such mail from. Convince the sources of postal spam that removing those people from their list makes the rest of their list more valuable. Convince the downstream customers of those sources that using your list directly is far more convenient for them than dealing with opt-outs from every individual on it. That also gives people a continued incentive to pay to remain on that list.

bogomipz 10y ago
>"the USPS has a detailed process for formally putting a company on notice for mailing someone who has specifically unsubscribed, and that process ends in massive fines for continued mailing to that person." I am doubting this is enforced in any meaningful way. I don't doubt there is a well-detailed process however the US Post Office's bread and butters seems to be Dell Catalogs and Southwest Airlines credit card offers. This fact is what killed Outbox: http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/ http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-off...

shshhdhs 10y ago

What about pay-per-record? If you identify 100 records? You could charge $50 (50 cents per record, as an example). Shows the value versus a blanket annual fee. The price-per-record could be reduced for the more records they have, or capped at $100 or something.

npezolano 10y ago

Why not structure the company as a public benefit corporation or a non-profit?

JoshTriplett 10y ago
> Why not structure the company as a public benefit corporation or a non-profit? This seems like a good idea; I'd happily support such an endeavor.

SomeCollegeBro 10y ago

Well, there could be a possible solution to your first problem: offer both a high priced one-time removal attempt, or a recurring subscription with a minimum contractual obligation (6 months for example).

Sunset 10y ago

What about a better business idea. Accept cryptocurrency to shut down these aggregating and re-selling services. Physically, by any means necessary. ANY.

mirimir 10y ago
Obligatory reference to https://cryptome.org/ap.htm https://cryptome.org/ap.htm

bogomipz 10y ago

>"I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services." I would be interested in hearing what are you basing this on? Did you do some market research? My feeling is that there is money in privacy, people seem to have no problem paying 5 or 10 dollars a month for a VPN provider for instance.

jameslk 10y ago
I can't remember the exact reasons since it was something I was researching a couple years ago. I saw a few competing services that offered annual plans in the $50-$100 range and I think I divided that by 12 and then imagined what would happen when people got most of the value out of the service on first use. It seems to be a very niche market and I'm not sure how much of a pain point it really is to that niche. I had some other ideas to differentiate, which were a bit of a gray-area hack. This included pulling from the same data sources that Spokeo and similar services use to be able to search for that data. That way, the user wouldn't have to enter any personal information other than say an email address. You could then offer a free service that let users enter their email address and they would find all the sites you've crawled where you found their information (similar to haveibeenpwned.com), with an upsell to automatically remove it. Once a subscriber was signed up or previously had used the free service and hadn't opted out, I would keep crawling services for additional data and then give them a warning email when their data popped up again. It seemed like a semi-reasonable business model at the time, but just a really small market, and I had other business ideas I wanted to pursue.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Interesting points. I wonder if giving the customer visibility into events like "you data was successfully removed from X" would make a difference? Similar to peeking at your Spam folder now and again to see that it is working for you. Also about the market size I imagine the market is just US? It seems other places, at leas Europe anyway has better laws to protect against these kinds of invasive services.

ccvannorman 10y ago

>I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services. $5-10 a month right here, and I am not rich (yet). Time is valuable. My offer goes up with assurances/contingencies if my name is still on the lists/I am affected (e.g. LifeLock's $1M backing guarantee).

EmielMols 10y ago

You could always "enhance" the business case by selling "whitelisting" to some of these data collection services. Just ask the guy from adblock plus.

gcb0 10y ago

why would people pay for the opposite of what they daily work on at Facebook for free: sharing their private life. the new generation grew up with spam and giving out private info like there's no tomorrow. I may sound like a pessimist, but try to talk to any 14-16 year old and see for yourself.