16 years ago, my first Bay Area engineering job was at Reputation Defender. I helped create their first product - the EXACT same thing it looks like Optery is making. Make no mistake, the company was named "reputation defender" but it was optery.
Even in 2006, the problem was the same and the solution seems roughly the same.
Reputation Defender rebranded a few times. I don't think they have this feature anymore. Might be worth asking them why they got rid of it, if that's what they did do.
Working there on the tool, I always felt like it was pointless because it's an unsolvable problem and scrubbing your info from a few hundred of the top data collection sites wouldn't SOLVE the problem... it just makes it a tiny bit less terrible but the effectiveness is not measurable. I think the TLDR is that people want solutions to things and programmatically unsubscribing only "works" in well lit neighborhoods and those too often aren't the causes of consumer pain.
Trying to solve the problem by deleting records is sort of like contract tracing coronavirus. Efforts to solve the problem by stomping it out wasn't viable and we now know we just need to learn to live with it in the endemic phase.
16 years ago there were no privacy laws and very little public awareness and enforcement for privacy, so it was easy for data brokers to ignore removal requests and they operated largely unchecked. But a lot has changed since 2006. Real privacy laws are being enacted, the public has become outraged, and several lawsuits have been prosecuted against data brokers successfully.
This has led data brokers to taking opt out requests much more seriously, with most of them investing in real technical infrastructure to handle and process opt outs successfully. Until the CCPA was passed, there was not even a standard requirement for a data broker to even have an opt out page.
Today, if you Google the name of someone using a data removal service like Optery, versus the name of someone that does not, you will see a night and day difference in the number of listings in Google from data brokers. Without Optery, you’ll find dozens of data broker listings with current and past home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, age, family members names, etc. With Optery, that information will be almost impossible to find making bad actors much more likely to move on to the next person who has not taken steps to protect their privacy.
I imagine having a team of layers work on this problem for a year or two could result in going on a “do not mess with” list amongst the majority of data brokers. Your information might be worth a few bucks, but I reckon a rich person’s data (who is willing to put on the pressure) is a liability.
Even in 2006, the problem was the same and the solution seems roughly the same.
Reputation Defender rebranded a few times. I don't think they have this feature anymore. Might be worth asking them why they got rid of it, if that's what they did do.
Working there on the tool, I always felt like it was pointless because it's an unsolvable problem and scrubbing your info from a few hundred of the top data collection sites wouldn't SOLVE the problem... it just makes it a tiny bit less terrible but the effectiveness is not measurable. I think the TLDR is that people want solutions to things and programmatically unsubscribing only "works" in well lit neighborhoods and those too often aren't the causes of consumer pain.
Trying to solve the problem by deleting records is sort of like contract tracing coronavirus. Efforts to solve the problem by stomping it out wasn't viable and we now know we just need to learn to live with it in the endemic phase.