opteryology

The "respawning" issue slabity mentioned where data vanishes and then pops back up weeks later is the core structural problem of this industry. It’s a game of whack-a-mole: you get removed from Broker A, but they re-ingest your data from a public record scrape or another broker a few months later. That’s why effective removal has to be continuous, not a one-off.

However, the specific issue Krebs highlights with Mozilla/OneRep is trust. It turns out OneRep’s founder was actually running active people-search sites (like Nuwber) on the side. It's hard to trust a removal service that has a financial stake in the very industry it's supposed to be fighting.

For an alternative without that conflict, take a look at Optery (YC W22). We've been flagging the OneRep situation for years. Full disclosure, I'm on the team at Optery. Optery launched on HN in 2021.

Absolutely agree with the importance of removing information from data brokers (aka People Search Sites), since they are be a goldmine for bad actors.

Actually, Optery is a YC 2022 company and there are some good discussions on Optery and its competitors here on HN, ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605010

For those evaluating data removal services, a solid first step is to sign up for each company’s free scan and compare the results.

Full disclosure: I am on the Optery team

OneRep has affiliate partnerships with data brokers (https://imgur.com/a/juSC66b).

There are a couple of in-depth threads here on HN discussing the different companies you mentioned.

Here is one in particular that includes some people sharing reviews, plus Optery's CEO going into detail on the different data removal companies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605010

If you're interested in these services, a good approach is to sign up for each company’s free scan and compare the results.

Full disclosure: I am on the team at Optery

Optery analyzed the Top 1000 posts in r/privacy to identify the most mentioned people and organizations.

RESULTS: Edward Snowden was mentioned in post titles 27 times in the top 1000 posts. Snowden was followed by Mark Zuckerberg, another r/Privacy recurring-character, followed by US political figures Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Facebook was mentioned in post submission titles 131 times, more than any other organization. Next was Google at 121 mentions, followed by the other constituents of FAANG and then Government agencies like the NSA.

Post submission volume in r/Privacy grew steadily from 2016 and peaked in early 2021. Most post scores were clustered around 1200 karma, with clusters at 5k, 10k, and 15k karma.

CONCLUSION: The frequency and score for posts on r/Privacy has grown steadily, possibly indicating an increasing concern and awareness among users about their online privacy. This trend may be due to the growing number of data breaches and privacy incidents, as well as increased public scrutiny and regulations around privacy. We hope that increased mainstream awareness leads to better protections for consumers.

METHODOLOGY: For this analysis, Optery used Reddit’s APIs to collect public data on the top 1000 posts in r/Privacy and analyze the post title data with Named Entity Recognition. We also use Google Trends for Search Volume information.