Privacy

31798 readers

326 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Services for removing your data from public databases (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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.