Last year I did a major fuckup and bought a .us domain without noticing that they don’t support WhoIs privacy, so my name number and address became part of the public WhoIs database scrapes. Since then my spam texts and calls have vastly multiplied. I’m realistic about the fact that the damage is done and it’ll always exist out there, but I would happily pay some money to a service that sends takedown requests for the data in the public databases like LexisNexis etc. to lessen the damage. Do you know of any services that do this somewhat reliably? Or even a guide or something about doing this manually?
ars posted this article today: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/its-not-worth-paying-to-be-removed-from-people-finder-sites-study-says/
takeaways:
- the paid automated options don’t work very well
- easyoptouts had the best success rate at (only) 65%
- claims connections between the data sites and removal sites – i certainly saw a few ads on the sites but nothing points any fingers at any of the services mentioned in the comments here.
i ended up using kanary and optery in the free tier and doing the removals manually. but to follow up on my OP, there’s no service i’ve seen that goes any deeper than what comes up on google, which is disappointing. there are larger, private databases (such as lexisnexis) which was hoping to be able to get out of.
What those service did is sending out-out request enmassed for you.
Whether your data deteted is depend on those receive and honor the request.
I made the same mistake. I have been using DeleteMe, I think it helped some but it’s definitely no silver bullet.
Try the Hogo mobile app - they will do some of these for you for free every month or pay a month and do removals on all the sites they cover, then discontinue.
