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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

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 5y ago
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.

beyondd 5y ago

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.