Dragon Hacks: Opt Out

Meet Your Foe: People Search Sites

In our modern world, the bulk of all human written knowledge is literally at our fingertips. From our smartphones, we can search for just about anything. In fact, we’re drowning in information and we rely on search engines and now AI to sift through the information haystacks to find the needle we’re looking for. This vast ocean of data contains a lot of public records – voter registration, criminal records, legal filings (like marriage and divorce records), property sale documents, professional and sport license info, and much more. Those records can contain a lot of our personal information – and data brokers are hoovering up that data and bundling it for sale.

I wrote a whole series of articles on this topic (Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT), including tips for reducing that data. But for this Dragon Hack, I want to focus on one particular and common source of personal information: people search sites. These sites attempt to collect information like full name, gender, date of birth, mailing address, phone numbers, email addresses, employment history, criminal records, debt collections and liens, close relatives, and even people you have my have lived with. Many of these sites will remove your data, but you have to find them and often go through painful processes.

Wield Your Weapon: EasyOptsOuts

Thankfully, there’s an easy-button solution that will do a lot of this work for you. While there are lots of for-pay services out there, Consumer Reports, Privacy Guides and I all pretty much agree on the best service for most people: EasyOptOuts. It’s only $20 a year and it does a very good job. I’ve actually interviewed the guys that run EasyOptOuts and it’s well worth a listen if you’re curious how it works behind the scenes.

The process is pretty simple:

1. Sign up for EasyOptOuts and give them some personal info
2. They will then attempt to find your info on dozens and dozens of people search sites
3. If they find your data, they will submit removal requests on your behalf and track the results

It’s going to feel weird to give your personal information to a third party, but they’re going to need that information in order to see if you exist on the various search sites. They keep your info safe and only give the search sites what is necessary to find you. The entire system is completely automated, which is how they keep the costs down – but it’s also very effective. And it will also run periodically because these sites will sometimes automatically repopulate your data after some period of time.

Bask in the Glory

I recommend that you do a little searching for your information beforehand, so you can see what’s already out there. Head over to the wonderful Big-Ass Data Broker Opt Out List (BADBOOL) to quickly find links to some of the top search sites. This site also has information to help you manually request the removal of your data, but EasyOptOuts is a hell of a lot easier.

You might also consider signing up for the free, personal version of Optery, which will send you a report of where it found your data. While their removal service is also good, it’s a lot more expensive and not significantly better.

EasyOptOuts will send you a report every 4 months. You can use the BADBOOL links to check on your progress from time to time. But the process to request data removal can take some time – these sites can be slow to respond – so don’t expect things to happen right away.

Continue Your Quest

If you want to learn more…

• Listen to my interview with the guys from EasyOptOuts
• Read my full article series on finding and deleting data from data brokers
• You might also like the series on deleting old online accounts
• You should probably enable Global Privacy Control (GPC), too
• Check out Yael Grauer’s excellent Big-Ass Data Broker Opt Out List (BADBOOL)
• Privacy Guide’s article on deleting data from brokers