Scrub your personal data from online people searches
There’s a lot you can do to limit the information that’s available about you online. You can lock down your social media accounts so the public can’t see your private information. You can use masked email accounts, phone numbers, and credit cards to avoid giving away your personal details when you shop. But after you’ve done everything possible, there’s still a lot about you that’s a matter of public record. Aggregating this data and selling you to anyone who’s interested is big business. If this lack of privacy worries you, you may be ready for Abine DeleteMe. I mentioned masked email, phone, and credit cards as one protection for your privacy. Abine Blur Premium, from the same company, offers those, among other features. You can shop and buy online without ever giving your real email or credit card. DeleteMe protects a completely different side of your private life. Its human operators actively opt you out from the most active and egregious personal data aggregators, and then keep watch for any that pick up your data again. How Much Does DeleteMe Cost? A DeleteMe subscription costs $129 per year, which comes to nearly $11 per month. IDX Privacy, which includes a similar feature called Forget Me, runs $79.95 per year and includes a wide variety of other privacy-protecting features. However, IDX Privacy sticks to handling broker sites that support a fully automated opt-out process. DeleteMe, by contrast, employs human agents to handle significant sites where automation won’t cut it. My DeleteMe contact pointed out that some of the biggest brokers require human intervention, and that even if a service clears those that respond to automation, those brokers can pick you up again from the ones that don’t. You can reduce what you pay per person by adding family members to your DeleteMe account. Paying two years at a time also gets you a break. One person for two years costs $209 total, a $49 savings. There’s nothing DeleteMe’s experts do that you couldn’t do yourself, of course. If you have more time than money, you can protect your own privacy by studying and following the company’s extensive DIY Opt-Out Guide. This page includes detailed instructions for requesting removal from just about every data broker website. Many privacy-conscious people, however, will prefer to pay the company, if they can afford it. The company also offers a business-focused version of DeleteMe. An enterprise or small business can sign up to protect its whole staff, or its most public-facing employees. From the individual’s point of view, the experience is hardly different from the consumer-side service. But the business gets a whole management and tracking system. Spear phishing attacks try to create convincing fake emails using personal details of their targeted employees. Prominent reporters and other media personnel risk doxing, or even having protestors appear at their homes. For these and other reasons, DeleteMe’s business edition is growing in popularity. Data-Broker Basics Data broker sites don’t steal your personal info. Rather, they gather public information that any persistent researcher could find, package it nicely, and put it on the market. Some brokers like Spokeo and ZabaSearch have been around for ages, but new ones pop up all the time. Anybody can use them. You give them a name and, if possible, a state or other info to narrow the search. They return just enough data for you to confirm the match, perhaps an address, or a partial phone number. When you click for full details after confirmation, you typically must pay a fee. Someone who’s looking for you doesn’t have to pick just one broker site. Google someone’s name adding « address » and you’re likely to get hits from the aggregators, like « [name] found in 16 states. » So, anybody who wants to know where you live, whether it’s to send you a fruit basket or to organize an exorcism on your front lawn, can likely find you on the internet through one or more brokers. Worried at all? Note that DeleteMe can’t actively remove you from search results. However, once its automated systems and human operators remove your data from the brokers, those sites won’t show up in search.
