Aura, DeleteMe, et al. - Personal Information Deletion Services - Are they legit?

[Anti Snigger]

If you've been on YouTube in the last couple of years, you've doubtlessly seen ads for services that claim to be able to request the deletion of your personal information. I have been skeptical of these since first being exposed to them, and through some cursory exploration, my opinion seems to be warranted. The services appear actually send all of your provided information to the databases they are requesting deletion to as part of the process. It's also been shown that the deletion requests do not prevent the data from being re-added at a later point, reducing the endeavor to a game of whack-a-mole.

To me, at least, it appears that these services provide the appearance of security, more than any actual outcome, and I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts.

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

i think they're a scam. companys literally pay for your data, why would it stop?

 

[Anti Snigger]

i think they're a scam. companys literally pay for your data, why would it stop?

That's my impression too. There's also the eternal adage of "if it's too good to be true, it probably is"

 

[Temperance]

Funnily... Liz Fong-Jones' reputation management company, Tall Poppy, recently participated in a study on the effectiveness of people-search removal services.

https://innovation.consumerreports....aluating-people-search-site-removal-services/ [Archive]
PDF report (also attached to this post): https://innovation.consumerreports....ting-People-Search-Site-Removal-Services-.pdf

Some snippets:

Many people want to pay services to do the work of removing their information from people-search sites for them, but it’s not clear how people-search site removal services stack up. Consumer Reports’ Security Planner teamed up with digital safety organization Tall Poppy to analyze the effectiveness of paid people-search site removal services.

We used seven people-search removal services (Confidently, DeleteMe, EasyOptOuts, IDX, Kanary, Optery, and ReputationDefender) to attempt to delete participant profile data from 13 people-search sites (BeenVerified, CheckPeople, ClustrMaps, Dataveria, Intelius, MyLife, Nuwber, PeopleFinders, PublicDataUSA, Radaris, Spokeo, ThatsThem, and Whitepages).

The test was conducted over a four-month period, between May and September 2023. We first did an initial search to see what data we could find about the participants on the 13 people-search sites. We then signed up each participant for a people-search removal site (or, for the control group, manually requested deletion at each of the 13 people-search sites). We then checked each of the 13 people-search sites for data about the participants three different times—one week later, one month later, and four months later—and recorded the results. Specifically, we looked to see whether profiles containing their personal information were still on the sites or had been removed.

Findings
1) As a whole, people-search removal services are largely ineffective.

Private information about each participant on the people-search sites decreased after using the people-search removal services. And, not surprisingly, the removal services did save time compared with manually opting out.
But, without exception, information about each participant still appeared on some of the 13 people-search sites at the one-week, one-month, and four-month intervals.
We initially found 332 instances of information about the 28 participants who would later be signed up for removal services (that does not include the four participants who were opted out manually). Of those 332 instances, only 117, or 35%, were removed within four months.

Some services performed better than others. EasyOptOuts and Optery performed the best of the services we evaluated. (Notably, EasyOptOuts was also the least expensive service we evaluated, at $19.99 per year.) DeleteMe, IDX, and Kanary were midlevel performers. Confidently and ReputationDefender performed the worst.

2) Manual opt-outs were more effective than people-search removal services but were also far from perfect.

When we searched the 13 people-search sites for information on each of the four manual opt-out participants—one from each residence type group—we found 47 profiles.
After opting out those four participants at each of the 13 people-search sites, 33 of those 47 profiles were gone after the first week, and three more were gone after the first month. (No additional profiles had been removed after four months.)
That’s a “success rate” of about 70%, compared with a success rate of anywhere from 6% to 68% for people-search removal services.

4) Some people-search removal services advertise on or partner with people-search sites.

While we were performing opt-outs, we found that some people-search removal sites advertised on or even partnered with people-search sites. We see this as an implicit endorsement of the inherently problematic people-search ecosystem.
For example, after removing a volunteer’s data from ClustrMaps, we saw an ad for data removal service Onerep. (There has been additional reporting on Onerep’s ties to people-search sites on security news website KrebsOnSecurity.)
Additionally, the people-search site PeopleFinders advertised for the people-search removal site BrandYourself.

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BTW, the author of this report maintains a handy list on Github for anyone interested in manually opting out of people-search sites:
https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List

 

[Ho-oh]

They're largely ineffective, in my experience, unfortunately as someone who paid for these services years ago. The best antidote against personal data collection is yourself and if you can't see that, well I don't know what to say.

On the NordVPN topic:
I've always found it suspicious that they were able to get multiple YouTubers to shill for their product. If the product is free, you are the product. Anyone with half a brain should know this.

Edited to fix redundancy

 

[Markass the Worst]

Funnily... Liz Fong-Jones' reputation management company, Tall Poppy, recently participated in a study on the effectiveness of people-search removal services.

https://innovation.consumerreports....aluating-people-search-site-removal-services/ [Archive]
PDF report (also attached to this post): https://innovation.consumerreports....ting-People-Search-Site-Removal-Services-.pdf

I posted this to A&N.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

They probably just take your info, consolidate everything they find, delete it, then sell it themselves, assuming the whole thing isn't just them taking your money and doing nothing.

 

[Markass the Worst]

They probably just take your info, consolidate everything they find, delete it, then sell it themselves, assuming the whole thing isn't just them taking your money and doing nothing.

Some of them are even ran by the same people who run people search sites.