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.

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.

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.

I would love to learn this process! I've repeatedly asked for a certain mailing to stop and it hasn't ceased.

For example, I'm currently getting no less than 3 letters per week from Spectrum (formerly TWC) promoting their new triple-play plans. I drop all of them in the recycling bin.

I couldn't care less about their bottom line, but I do care about the environmental impact.

At 3x per week, it probably costs them around USD$0.80/week (postage, paper, printing, etc.) to send those 3 letters. Call it USD$1 to make the math easier. I currently pay about $9.03/week. If I upgraded, it would be at least 3x that amount.

I'm not sure how to calculate the profit they would gain after an upgrade, but I can't imagine it would take more than 2-3 months for the new rates to more than cover the mailing fees for an entire year of their letters.

And yet, I'll never upgrade and I hate the waste caused by their practices.

In the ones like Dell (which I've also experienced in the past), I suspect there's some metric involved for getting the most contacts for "coverage". The reality is unless they were tracking my moves to different companies, there could be different people with the same name. In that sense, I'm very glad they can't correlate with employment data.

There's also the idea that sending to multiple people within a company means someone may see something they want and try to go through the procurement process because of the catalog, rather than because "IT" says it's time for a refresh.

Not that I agree with any of those practices, for a number of reasons, but I could understand the case for them.

Putting on my cynic hat, buying lots of newspaper, television and radio ads is a good way to keep the media on the sidelines instead of criticizing the incumbents.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090201192037/http://junkbuster...

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-off...

We don't even want _one_ of them. It's not like we're going to see a new printer in a catalog and say "hey, sounds like a great buy!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

This seems like a good idea; I'd happily support such an endeavor.

* 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?

The more you'd pay for privacy, the more it would be worth to violate it.

$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).

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.

We'll see where it lands.

I personally would also pay for this sort of service.

How...? Or do you just mean sites like InstanCheckmate themeselves?

> They offered a way to "correct" the record, so I added a car that I don't own

That's amazing! They didn't need proof? How did you convince them? Is this legal?

IANAL

That said, fraud is usually defined as "An intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage."

So, in order for such misinformation to be illegal, the data broker needs only to demonstrate injury or damage. Unless the data broker makes assurances to their customer about the truth of the information and gets sued by one of their customers for providing false information, I find it hard to believe that the data broker will be able to demonstrate injury or damages.

I think the data broker knows better than to make such claims about their data but who really knows. And it isn't like the downstream customers are going to independently verify all the information.

What's the name of it?

Edit: Maybe it was a different site that needed your license (I thought it was SafeShepherd but I can't find it anymore). I know I've definitely come across ones that do.

Also note that SafeShepherd has this fine clause right at the end [1]:

"You agree that Safe Shepherd isn't liable for any failure to comply with these Terms."

What is this supposed to mean? Would you accept it?

[1] https://www.safeshepherd.com/tos

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/3q0cfz/thinking_ab...

Wish Google would just kill their site rankings, that would largely make the problem go away. Google is allowed to de-list spam sites... why they haven't classified all this crap as spam yet is beyond me.

> Your information will show up on those sites sometimes - it'll pop back up after being removed.

That suggests that they're not actually tracking down the sources, just poking the downstream sites that get data from those sources. Much less useful.

There's a legal process to, for example, expunge a criminal record. On the other hand, most counties aren't going to seal the records associated with your house or other property you've bought just because you would like them to.

1) Segregating automated email to some @customdomain.com address (Yandex and Zoho host vanity domains for free)

2) Forward all email @ that domain to a common inbox

3) Sign-up with [email protected] (e.g: [email protected])

You no-longer need to unsubscribe using dubious e-mail links, just automatically black-hole emails that come from [email protected]

So, far, so good.

EDIT: List formatting

It is much easier to make your correct info difficult to ascertain, than it is to remove it all.

Back in the day, junk mail often had "Return Service Requested", and senders had to pay return postage. So we would tape address labels to cardboard-wrapped bricks, and mark them as "moved with no forwarding address". But that doesn't work anymore.

I've been using them since way back when they were on earlibird. It's not perfect, but it has reduced the amount of times I show up in these sites significantly. The only disheartening thing is that most of these operators seem to just dump in batches of data periodically, ignoring any prior requests to remove so it has to be done again (which is fine, that's what you pay their automated search and remove request feature for)

These guys don't do it for you? Basically it is there business plan.