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.