Has anyone ever used that DeleteMe [1] service the article mentions? It's not very cheap, and I'm wondering the value or if anyone has any first hand 2 cents on using it?
Consumer Reports also provides a free service called Permission Slip [1] that auto-submits opt-out requests for a variety of retailers/services as well as data brokers.
It is difficult to tell how effective these services are, but if nothing else, I’d prefer to minimize my footprint as much as possible. I don’t think this does much to help with the credit bureaus, though.
We desperately need real privacy laws with teeth.
- [0] https://www.optery.com/
forcing users to install apps, which can harvest much more personal data, seems sketchy to me, especially for a service that's supposed to understand that the user doesn't want that
I haven’t combed through the privacy policy on their website, but the way I see it, I’m not worse off by sharing a few bits of data with CR, and as far as I can tell, they’re not doing obviously nefarious things.
If you want to be horrified, use a different email address for each service. I have a domain that I configured to forward to me, so for example if I got a loan through Hacker News Home Loans, I'd give them email "hackernewshomeloans@example.com" . Doesn't work for everything, but it is a good eye opener.
IIWM I think the benefits outweigh the cons of dropping the monitoring, but others may have different situations/priorities.
This sounds very much like trusting a fox to guard the henhouse. When do they then do with the submitted personal information? Why should we trust that they will behave ethically with it? What happens if, and when, they have a data breach?
They have no incentive to behave incorrectly as all their business is based on trust.
https://help.joindeleteme.com/hc/en-us/articles/817118498523...
Then nobody knows. "What if?" works for litterally anything anywhere and nobody can respond to all of them, so I’m not sure what you’re expecting here.
And offer a deleteme-like service with broad coverage and an affordable rate for removals and monitoring. We received a grant from YC for our work in 2019.