Data brokers are like the hydra, one goes down and another 2 new ones pop up. It's a lot of work to keep on top of deletions if you want privacy.
These "data removal" services spend a lot of effort going after the frontends, which is pretty self-serving: they can show the customer that there's something new to remove every single month or quarter, so you have to keep paying forever.
Parent's argument is that current approach leads to an endless cat and mouse game the user ends up paying, when there would be ways to end it faster and cheaper.
Does that mean the user keeps paying just to have someone somewhere do "something" ?
And that, even if fundamentally it can't solve the sutiation, can't prove it's even improving in any specific ways (telling you it removes hundreds of instances doesn't tell you how many have been added in the meantime), and they also have no incentives to be too zealous as the numbers in the reports would be going down and the motivation to subscribe also diminish.
Ps: perhaps the way out of this is to make it a non profit that provides jobs to people in need, and have the subscription a recurring donation ?
yes this is what I mean, you need to contact each one to have data removed… there are hundreds of these
It’s hard to imagine what the situation actually looks like behind the scenes.
random companies will buy the data, do a little collation and merge datasets from multiple sources, start their own frontend, and resell it to consumers doing google searches for phone numbers, names, etc
because they’re not directly affiliated with the primary brokers, there are hundreds of these independent frontends… and unless you contact each one, they can all resell their data (even to each other)
so if you miss one removal, it’s possible your data gets picked up by a new frontend from that frontend… your data can kind of proliferate through this gross ether forever