The Mozilla offering looks somewhat comparable, but I do wonder if they’re going to beat a company which has the sole focus of solving this problem.
If nothing else, I’m glad there are more offerings showing up on this space because of the competition this will hopefully generate.
Consumer Reports also has a semi-related offering called “Permission Slip” that is focused on opting out of data sharing with individual companies, e.g. Netflix, Home Depot, etc.
You can also just use the free version to collect a list of brokers your self and manually contact all of them to find out how much of a pain in the ass it is.
Optery generally has 2 types of customers:
- The first type are those that care a lot about their privacy and the cost of an ongoing subscription is insignificant to them, so they keep the service running on an ongoing basis for the ongoing automated scans and removals and for getting new data brokers they get coverage for immediately as they are added into the system.
- The second type of customer is more price conscious and is basically looking back and forth between their credit card statement and their Optery dashboard each month and then they either pause or cancel the subscription when they feel they're reached a good stopping point. Optery's pause subscription feature is very popular for this type of customer and you can use it to automatically re-start the service in 3, 6, 9 months, etc.
- Another thing to point out is many other services only offer Yearly subscriptions, Optery offers Yearly or Monthly. If you're price conscious, the Monthly is nice because you can turn it on and off, or pause it as you wish.
More detail on the topic of keeping Optery running on an ongoing basis is on the Optery Help Desk here:
https://help.optery.com/en/article/why-should-i-keep-my-opte...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39276106
beyonddd should really identify themselves as the founder of a competitor. Nothing wrong with posting, but pseudo-anonymously disparaging the competition seems very inappropriate.
It also adds some credibility: You actually know what you're talking about in regard to this kind of service.
That might not be the most effective way to reduce spam or reduce targeted attacks, because it ignores many hard to remove exposures.
We have a similar price point at Kanary (I'm the founder) and it covers the resources we invest in the cat & mouse game required to escalate and complete removals on a wide variety of sites, not just a handful of easy ones.
Your documentation says:
"You can only select one email and one phone number for scans at this time. However, Optery's engineering team is actively working on providing more configuration options such as the ability to run scans on demand for multiple email addresses and phone numbers."
Any comments on when this will be an option? I would want automatic scans on all of my emails and phone numbers. Not very useful for me without this.
That said, Optery recursively searches through data exposed by data brokers to alleviate the need to input numerous old phones and emails by the customer. In PCMag.com review they said this of Optery's recursive phone number search functionality:
"It uses data found in data broker profiles to recursively expand its reach. For example, in my latest testing, I only gave it my current phone number, but it found records associated with an old number that I used for some 25 years."
I get what you're saying about how emails aren't the primary means of finding people, but it is a way, and something people often do have more then one of. I'd humbly request you reconsider and try to better incorporate support for automated scans on multiple emails/phones into the main product. For what its worth it looks like Mozilla's product supports 5 based on their docs.
That said, after submitting this comment I'm going to go ahead and sign up for the one year ultimate anyway in hopes that you will reconsider my request if I'm a paid user. :)
Also, you mentioned using Experian's data removal service previously. Do you mind me asking how many exposed profiles the Optery scan located that Experian missed?