8 ms·

Ask HN: Best service to remove you from data brokers?

120 points by aigoochamna 6y ago

Has anyone used a service to clean up your online presence/remove you and your family from data brokers (such as people finders, white pages, etc)?

nickthemagicman 6y ago
Bumping.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
georgespencer 6y ago
Dang this is ahead of schedule, but here we are anyway. We are working on something for this at KBYE.io. (It's in beta testing.) Screen grab here: https://ibb.co/TgKS6dR https://ibb.co/TgKS6dR Email me if you want to help out. We think there are some neat solutions enabled by GDPR. (And thanks to Basecamp for permission to slightly denigrate the HEY logo :)
- georgespencer 6y ago
  Here's the HN post we wrote to help scope the project before we started: Summary: you know those irritating “prospecting” databases which sell your email address to people who want to send you spam? (Hunter.io is a good example.) We built a tool, in partnership with our friends at a great law firm, which will unsubscribe you from more than 50 of them with a single click. Background: my inbox is besieged by cold emails from people I don’t want to hear from. Recruiters, outsource software teams, boutique investment banks I’ve never heard of… it’s a constant source of mild low-level frustration. I don’t have the time to unsubscribe from them all, and archiving is work I don’t want to do. (They also tend to not honour unsubscribe requests…) They call it “prospecting”, I call it “spam”. After GDPR kicked in, I started replying to them with a quick keyboard macro. If I type in ‘gdprfob’, my email client inserts a properly structured GDPR subject access and deletion request. As part of the subject access request, I ask where they got my email in the first place, and what consents they sought. More than 50% of all the cold emails I get use some sort of prospecting database, and none of them — neither the marketers nor the prospecting databases themselves — ever obtained an opt-in. Of course there’s no obligation for them to obtain my permission, as their replies always point out, but that doesn’t really excuse either the discourtesy, or the fact that “this thing we do isn’t illegal” is as unedifying as justifying bigotry with "freedom of speech derrrr!" So we’re cutting them off at the source. We’d love to help people stop these low integrity services from buying and selling their contact details. At the very least it’ll get you out of their system, but maybe if enough people do it, they’ll do the kind, courteous thing and switch to an opt-in service which obtains consent to list your contact details for anyone to see. How it works: give us your email address. Once you’ve verified that you control the account, we manually fill out the forms and send GDPR deletion requests where filling in the forms is not possible. At the end, we’ll send you a receipt which you can use to take up your case with the ICO in case one of the deletion requests is not honoured. We hash your email address after the final receipt is sent so that we can double check you aren’t using us to spam the spammers, but we have no access to your data and our logs are scrubbed clean. We won’t be selling your info like unroll.me did, and we’ve made sure that we can’t ever do it just in case.
  - aigoochamna 6y ago
    Thanks for the summary. Do you have a list of the 50 or so databases you unsubscribe from? Do you have any metrics around how many such databases exist in total?
    - georgespencer 6y ago
      There are a lot. A few (this list is unaudited; we did a big dump and as we add a new one we verify that it should be on the list): Hunter.io AnyMailFinder Lusha Datanyze Insider Find That Email Voila Norbert Hiretual Find That Lead Findemails.com Uplead Rocketreach ContactOut Discoverly GetEmail Sellhack Clearbit Connect CEO Email LeadFeeder Prospect.io MailTester Skrapp apollo.io Lead Fuze ZoomInfo Prophet Linkedin Sales Navigator Ringleads DMS Capture Data.com NinjaOutreach Crunchbase Mattermark Builtwithin Detective Mention Mailshake Snov.io Propeller CRM Aeroleads Mail tester Vainu Owler Demodesk minelead
      - 3np 6y ago
        You should add Hiresweet to that list.
  - lmkg 6y ago
    Do you have plans to expand to CCPA requests as well? Some US companies will loudly and vehemently not care about European laws, but are beholden to California laws.
  - nicholasjarnold 6y ago
    This is a great idea. Thank you for working on it. Allow me to suggest a feature for your roadmap that might be particularly helpful to people like myself that take this rather seriously: Support users that are in a habit of creating and using a unique email address per service that they subscribe to. (perhaps this is a bit niche for MVP, I realize) For instance, I own a domain that I use solely for email. I have a configuration that allows me to type <any-thing-here>@<my-domain>.<TLD>, after which that email address will automatically route to my main inbox. Therefore, I have probably 100+ email addresses that have been used for various accounts and services like Netflix, Amazon, Foobar Business LLC, etc. It would be great to be able to use your service with my many 'primary keys' rather than just one. Perhaps you plan to support this already, but if not hopefully this comment leads to a discussion/consideration in your team.
- unstatusthequo 6y ago
  Might be able to help out with CCPA analogue. Not sure how to email you though. Site goes directly to login page.
  - georgespencer 6y ago
    mistergeorgespencer+HN@gmail.com Thank you!
- ffpip 6y ago
  I know your site is in beta, but you should remove the 'See what our customers say' section until you have customer reviews. https://i.ibb.co/zS1zNq6/Screenshot-2020-10-20-Remove-Personal-Info-from-Google-Delete-Me.png https://i.ibb.co/zS1zNq6/Screenshot-2020-10-20-Remove-Person...
  - georgespencer 6y ago
    Don't think that's us! KBYE.io currently asks for credentials and doesn't display anything.
    - ffpip 6y ago
      I replied to the wrong comment. Sorry!
FerretFred 6y ago
Bumping
- hawkoy 6y ago
  On HN, more comments will de-rank the post to make space for newer less discussed content. This bumping is spam and opposite of what you intended to do.
heisenbit 6y ago
I wonder whether any service save witness protection or hitmen can achieve such wonders. Would be nice though.
web007 6y ago
When I used to work at Reputation dot com they had a service that would do this, opting out of most of the worst of the data brokers and other mailer/aggregation companies. They've pivoted to corporate reputation management AFAIK, but may still have the personal opt-out service as a side benefit.
fapi1974 6y ago
Bumping
4d66ba06 6y ago
I use https://joindeleteme.com/ https://joindeleteme.com/ and it seems to work well
- plants 6y ago
  so absurd. why is it $129/year to remove myself from lists that I didn't consent to be added to in the first place?
  - derwiki 6y ago
    Same reason you pay for trash removal of physical junk mail that’s delivered to your house
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      technically you could try putting RETURN TO SENDER on all your junk mail and put them back in a blue collection box. https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-Options-Do-I-Have-Regarding-Unwanted-Unsolicited-Mail https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-Options-Do-I-Have-Regard...
      - qppo 6y ago
        It's crossed my mind before to start a service that collects junk mail and sends it to the home address of the executives at the junk mail aggregates (there's only a handful of them last I tried to stop receiving junk). On the one hand it's definitely harassment to find out someone's address just to send them things they don't want for the purposes of changing their behavior. On the other hand, that's their business model.
        horlux 6y ago
        brilliant
        paledot 6y ago
        Now that I would pay $129/year for.
pgt 6y ago
In South Africa you could add your contact details to the Direct Marketers' Association's Do Not Call list, but the list was hacked and the contact details sold.
- ffpip 6y ago
  What was is the point of 'hacking' it? The list should be public right? So every telemarketer can access it and not call you? Or is it done via your telecom provider?
  - onion2k 6y ago
    It should be accessible to telemarketers, obviously, but that's not the public...
    - ffpip 6y ago
      Well, if any telemarketer can access it, it is public.
    - andrepd 6y ago
      So it was leaked, not hacked, right?
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    It’s a lookup. You enter details and get back whether you are allowed to contact them.
ffpip 6y ago
Usually, these services require even more data than they already have. EG: Govt id, phone number, etc. It is usually not worth the effort.
zwkrt 6y ago
I bought an Alcatel flip phone without GPS capability. Cost me $40 minus the price I got for selling my iPhone. Now my data is useless!
sparker72678 6y ago
Death?
- fsflover 6y ago
  Will not necessarily help I guess.
tiffanyh 6y ago
I'd love it if there was a national "Do Not SMS" list. (Especially during this US election season). Though I'd assume companies like Twilio would massively lobby against it.
- Santosh83 6y ago
  India tried this. But was a big failure. Getting on the list was non-trivial and it wasn't enforced well anyway. Of course that isn't to say the US can't do better, but general consumer rights is down in the dumps these days...
rasikjain 6y ago
It is not a service but a github page with helpful content which I recently came across. This has list of databrokers and their links to opt-out. https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-Li...
Ladyady 6y ago
Not exactly what you're asking for, but may help others https://saymine.com/ https://saymine.com/
nellagerg 6y ago
I used https://brandyourself.com/ https://brandyourself.com/ a while ago when I was starting a new company...had a connection to the founder over there so decided to give it a shot. They seem to have added more functionality over the years, but I cannot speak to those. What I can say is it met my expectations at the time, and if they successfully developed what was on their road map its probably a decent place to start. I also downloaded an email client that let me instantly unsubscribe from lists I was somehow on, use a VPN, DuckDuckGO even has an app...idk, I mean the list goes on...i found that in the end, it was up to me to make sure i was closing myself off intelligently while digitally engaged.
poletopole 6y ago
I used to work for a pair of real estate investors involved in a pyramid scheme in my early days as a developer. The investors would pay a lot of money to access a data broker to find houses that were, for example, going through foreclosure, short sale, arbitration, etc. We got some pretty violent phone calls regarding how exactly we knew what we did—your home is usually the last thing you want to lose next. There isn’t any panacea for scrubbing your data from these brokers. All the spam email, texts, calls, or even snail mail most of the time are coming from hydras like the real investors I mentioned, not large companies. Personally, I’m so sick of spam emails, smses, and calls that I’m just going to bite the bullet and start over by making an anonymous email/sms/voip service with Twilio (I did this professionally for 7 years) and put an end to it all.

120 points by aigoochamna 6y ago

Has anyone used a service to clean up your online presence/remove you and your family from data brokers (such as people finders, white pages, etc)?

nickthemagicman 6y ago

Bumping.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

georgespencer 6y ago

Dang this is ahead of schedule, but here we are anyway. We are working on something for this at KBYE.io. (It's in beta testing.) Screen grab here: https://ibb.co/TgKS6dR https://ibb.co/TgKS6dR Email me if you want to help out. We think there are some neat solutions enabled by GDPR. (And thanks to Basecamp for permission to slightly denigrate the HEY logo :)

georgespencer 6y ago
Here's the HN post we wrote to help scope the project before we started: Summary: you know those irritating “prospecting” databases which sell your email address to people who want to send you spam? (Hunter.io is a good example.) We built a tool, in partnership with our friends at a great law firm, which will unsubscribe you from more than 50 of them with a single click. Background: my inbox is besieged by cold emails from people I don’t want to hear from. Recruiters, outsource software teams, boutique investment banks I’ve never heard of… it’s a constant source of mild low-level frustration. I don’t have the time to unsubscribe from them all, and archiving is work I don’t want to do. (They also tend to not honour unsubscribe requests…) They call it “prospecting”, I call it “spam”. After GDPR kicked in, I started replying to them with a quick keyboard macro. If I type in ‘gdprfob’, my email client inserts a properly structured GDPR subject access and deletion request. As part of the subject access request, I ask where they got my email in the first place, and what consents they sought. More than 50% of all the cold emails I get use some sort of prospecting database, and none of them — neither the marketers nor the prospecting databases themselves — ever obtained an opt-in. Of course there’s no obligation for them to obtain my permission, as their replies always point out, but that doesn’t really excuse either the discourtesy, or the fact that “this thing we do isn’t illegal” is as unedifying as justifying bigotry with "freedom of speech derrrr!" So we’re cutting them off at the source. We’d love to help people stop these low integrity services from buying and selling their contact details. At the very least it’ll get you out of their system, but maybe if enough people do it, they’ll do the kind, courteous thing and switch to an opt-in service which obtains consent to list your contact details for anyone to see. How it works: give us your email address. Once you’ve verified that you control the account, we manually fill out the forms and send GDPR deletion requests where filling in the forms is not possible. At the end, we’ll send you a receipt which you can use to take up your case with the ICO in case one of the deletion requests is not honoured. We hash your email address after the final receipt is sent so that we can double check you aren’t using us to spam the spammers, but we have no access to your data and our logs are scrubbed clean. We won’t be selling your info like unroll.me did, and we’ve made sure that we can’t ever do it just in case.
- aigoochamna 6y ago
  Thanks for the summary. Do you have a list of the 50 or so databases you unsubscribe from? Do you have any metrics around how many such databases exist in total?
  - georgespencer 6y ago
    There are a lot. A few (this list is unaudited; we did a big dump and as we add a new one we verify that it should be on the list): Hunter.io AnyMailFinder Lusha Datanyze Insider Find That Email Voila Norbert Hiretual Find That Lead Findemails.com Uplead Rocketreach ContactOut Discoverly GetEmail Sellhack Clearbit Connect CEO Email LeadFeeder Prospect.io MailTester Skrapp apollo.io Lead Fuze ZoomInfo Prophet Linkedin Sales Navigator Ringleads DMS Capture Data.com NinjaOutreach Crunchbase Mattermark Builtwithin Detective Mention Mailshake Snov.io Propeller CRM Aeroleads Mail tester Vainu Owler Demodesk minelead
    - 3np 6y ago
      You should add Hiresweet to that list.
- lmkg 6y ago
  Do you have plans to expand to CCPA requests as well? Some US companies will loudly and vehemently not care about European laws, but are beholden to California laws.
- nicholasjarnold 6y ago
  This is a great idea. Thank you for working on it. Allow me to suggest a feature for your roadmap that might be particularly helpful to people like myself that take this rather seriously: Support users that are in a habit of creating and using a unique email address per service that they subscribe to. (perhaps this is a bit niche for MVP, I realize) For instance, I own a domain that I use solely for email. I have a configuration that allows me to type <any-thing-here>@<my-domain>.<TLD>, after which that email address will automatically route to my main inbox. Therefore, I have probably 100+ email addresses that have been used for various accounts and services like Netflix, Amazon, Foobar Business LLC, etc. It would be great to be able to use your service with my many 'primary keys' rather than just one. Perhaps you plan to support this already, but if not hopefully this comment leads to a discussion/consideration in your team.
unstatusthequo 6y ago
Might be able to help out with CCPA analogue. Not sure how to email you though. Site goes directly to login page.
- georgespencer 6y ago
  mistergeorgespencer+HN@gmail.com Thank you!
ffpip 6y ago
I know your site is in beta, but you should remove the 'See what our customers say' section until you have customer reviews. https://i.ibb.co/zS1zNq6/Screenshot-2020-10-20-Remove-Personal-Info-from-Google-Delete-Me.png https://i.ibb.co/zS1zNq6/Screenshot-2020-10-20-Remove-Person...
- georgespencer 6y ago
  Don't think that's us! KBYE.io currently asks for credentials and doesn't display anything.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    I replied to the wrong comment. Sorry!

FerretFred 6y ago

Bumping

hawkoy 6y ago
On HN, more comments will de-rank the post to make space for newer less discussed content. This bumping is spam and opposite of what you intended to do.

heisenbit 6y ago

I wonder whether any service save witness protection or hitmen can achieve such wonders. Would be nice though.

web007 6y ago

When I used to work at Reputation dot com they had a service that would do this, opting out of most of the worst of the data brokers and other mailer/aggregation companies. They've pivoted to corporate reputation management AFAIK, but may still have the personal opt-out service as a side benefit.

fapi1974 6y ago

Bumping

4d66ba06 6y ago

I use https://joindeleteme.com/ https://joindeleteme.com/ and it seems to work well

plants 6y ago
so absurd. why is it $129/year to remove myself from lists that I didn't consent to be added to in the first place?
- derwiki 6y ago
  Same reason you pay for trash removal of physical junk mail that’s delivered to your house
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    technically you could try putting RETURN TO SENDER on all your junk mail and put them back in a blue collection box. https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-Options-Do-I-Have-Regarding-Unwanted-Unsolicited-Mail https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-Options-Do-I-Have-Regard...
    - qppo 6y ago
      It's crossed my mind before to start a service that collects junk mail and sends it to the home address of the executives at the junk mail aggregates (there's only a handful of them last I tried to stop receiving junk). On the one hand it's definitely harassment to find out someone's address just to send them things they don't want for the purposes of changing their behavior. On the other hand, that's their business model.
      - horlux 6y ago
        brilliant
      - paledot 6y ago
        Now that I would pay $129/year for.

pgt 6y ago

In South Africa you could add your contact details to the Direct Marketers' Association's Do Not Call list, but the list was hacked and the contact details sold.

ffpip 6y ago
What was is the point of 'hacking' it? The list should be public right? So every telemarketer can access it and not call you? Or is it done via your telecom provider?
- onion2k 6y ago
  It should be accessible to telemarketers, obviously, but that's not the public...
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Well, if any telemarketer can access it, it is public.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    So it was leaked, not hacked, right?
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  It’s a lookup. You enter details and get back whether you are allowed to contact them.

ffpip 6y ago

Usually, these services require even more data than they already have. EG: Govt id, phone number, etc. It is usually not worth the effort.

zwkrt 6y ago

I bought an Alcatel flip phone without GPS capability. Cost me $40 minus the price I got for selling my iPhone. Now my data is useless!

sparker72678 6y ago

Death?

fsflover 6y ago
Will not necessarily help I guess.

tiffanyh 6y ago

I'd love it if there was a national "Do Not SMS" list. (Especially during this US election season). Though I'd assume companies like Twilio would massively lobby against it.

Santosh83 6y ago
India tried this. But was a big failure. Getting on the list was non-trivial and it wasn't enforced well anyway. Of course that isn't to say the US can't do better, but general consumer rights is down in the dumps these days...

rasikjain 6y ago

It is not a service but a github page with helpful content which I recently came across. This has list of databrokers and their links to opt-out. https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-Li...

Ladyady 6y ago

Not exactly what you're asking for, but may help others https://saymine.com/ https://saymine.com/

nellagerg 6y ago

I used https://brandyourself.com/ https://brandyourself.com/ a while ago when I was starting a new company...had a connection to the founder over there so decided to give it a shot. They seem to have added more functionality over the years, but I cannot speak to those. What I can say is it met my expectations at the time, and if they successfully developed what was on their road map its probably a decent place to start. I also downloaded an email client that let me instantly unsubscribe from lists I was somehow on, use a VPN, DuckDuckGO even has an app...idk, I mean the list goes on...i found that in the end, it was up to me to make sure i was closing myself off intelligently while digitally engaged.

poletopole 6y ago

I used to work for a pair of real estate investors involved in a pyramid scheme in my early days as a developer. The investors would pay a lot of money to access a data broker to find houses that were, for example, going through foreclosure, short sale, arbitration, etc. We got some pretty violent phone calls regarding how exactly we knew what we did—your home is usually the last thing you want to lose next. There isn’t any panacea for scrubbing your data from these brokers. All the spam email, texts, calls, or even snail mail most of the time are coming from hydras like the real investors I mentioned, not large companies. Personally, I’m so sick of spam emails, smses, and calls that I’m just going to bite the bullet and start over by making an anonymous email/sms/voip service with Twilio (I did this professionally for 7 years) and put an end to it all.