I have been upset recently by a colleague googling me and found my full name on several 3D Printing sites I used to use. I guess I signed in with my google account and so it just pops up now that I’ve deleted all my socials.
I have a fairly uncommon first + last combo so the cursory google search and then sending “delete my data” emails from the email they know from the 3 data brokers who popped up seems good and now just my linkedin is showing (this is the ideal state).
Is there more I’m missing? should I go for a deleteme subscription in case I missed anything? Other sources I should go to?
I really don’t mind sending my own emails to these pests, but is that really all the services are doing? Or is there a backend I’m missing?
I paid for a year of an incogni family plan and wiped my whole household off the internet. Within a month google searching largely stopped coming up with hits other than accounts I personally created. I’ve been quite happy with the service, It took no effort just $100.
Not completely relevant, but the foss website/extension justdeleteme is a good resource for going through and “deleting” accounts.
Every now and then I go through my bitwarden and delete accounts I don’t need anymore, contributing to the justdeleteme site if it’s not on there.
These services aren’t super expensive and they tend to do a pretty efficient job. I had a weirdo trying to doxx me for a year and was just pulling outdated info off broker sites, it’s a pain in the ass and clearing out that into all at once helps ease the mind.
Nope. Dont do it. Google yourself, search your email inbox, start doing it by hand. It will take months. Why not do it through a company? Here: https://youtu.be/iX3JT6q3AxA
You could put out fake data. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get your real data removed, so start giving fake info for stuff that doesn’t need know who you really are.
Restaurants who ask for my name, I give “Gordon R” or “Guy F” or something similar. Do that with your digital life.
Most of the address and numbers they do have are off or old.
I moved through a lot of places in college and one of those 5 are usually what shows up.
Now that I think about it I did used to sign up for a bunch of religious mailing lists before I would leave an apartment because I thought it was funny.
Yeah, sounds like you had awful digital hygiene. Not that it helps to have good digital hygeine like I did. All it takes is the majority of people’s opinions becoming sufficiently extremist for your life to be irrevocably ruined.
Unfortunately, emailing people won’t actually get your data removed. They are supposed to, legally speaking, but they have already sold your data to those who maliciously make use of it. That’s the only reason they let that law be in place, because once they sold data, the new owner is not obligated to delete their copies of that data. And they sell this data multiple times, meaning there are now countless owners of data about your personal history. Not just for advertising, either. It is increasingly obvious it’s being used to sway elections. If you value democracy, get an ad-blocker and refuse to disable it for any reason.
I think easyoptouts is worth it ($20/quarter). It has like a 70% success rate which will decrease a ton of grunt work for you. There are a lot (well north of 150+) of these data sites to try and manage.
Just because you remove data once does not mean it won’t be put back on the site later which means you need to make a habit of constantly rechecking the sites if you chose to do it yourself.
I would also recommend signing up to have Google alert you when your name comes up in searches. This will make it easy to remove them from Google and let you know what you still have to remove.
