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  • Broken@lemmy.ml
    5·
    9 hours ago

    They are a legitimate service. Whether you should use them or not is something you need to decide for yourself.

    One of the biggest things they are good for is not giving all of your information away. A lot of these privacy companies simply spam out all of your information and request for the company to delete anything that matches that.

    So for instance, if you signed up to a website newsletter with your email, they have your email address. And that’s it. Then comes a “privacy” company that send them your email address, name, home address, etc and asks them if they have any of this data then they need to delete it. That’s asinine and backwards.

    DeleteMe doesn’t do this. They are more specific with how they process the data removal requests.

    I’m not advocating for them, I don’t use them and probably never will. I have no idea if they are a good company or decent at what they claim to do. I just know they don’t do the spam technique.

    Personally, any company that is a mass sponsor of YouTube channels is something I won’t trust myself. But that’s just my weird litmus test.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      2·
      5 hours ago

      My personal feeling about companies like this is that there is very little reason to assume that requesting my information be deleted will result in it actually being deleted. So at best I’m paying to be ignored.

      If I could 100% guarantee that my personal information would actually be deleted upon request then sure it would be worth the money. But we all know that companies violate the law on a regular basis and nothing happens to them, especially if they’re US based. So why bother?

      All that nonsense can just hit my spam filter like it’s been doing for the past 20 years. It’s not like I answer the phone to unknown numbers either, so I’m not sure what I’m paying for here.

  • Nicro@discuss.tchncs.de
    11·
    1 day ago

    In reality they do help superficially, but they very much inflate their numbers on a shiny dashboard, showing you how much they’re helping. All while only hitting a small fraction of databrokers.

    I also think, that as a subscription solution to a problem, they could turn into the online version of turbotax any second now. Lobbying for harder self-optouts so that their service stays relevant.

  • belluck@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    75·
    2 days ago

    IIRC, they’re not a scam, but they also aren’t doing anything you couldn’t do yourself. They’re just sending opt-out requests to data brokers on your behalf.

    • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
      642·
      2 days ago

      There are hundreds of those data brokers. And new ones opening as others close every week. Doing it yourself, and keeping up with it on a regular basis? That’s nearly a full time job. Nobody does that.

      • MoonMelon@lemmy.mlEnglish
        23·
        2 days ago

        I’ve tried, it sucks. Each broker has their own process, often several steps, and often a step is broken (like server errors, can’t get past a captcha, “try again later”, etc). You end up not just having to do the process, but also follow up with many of the ones that are ambiguous or returned server errors or whatnot. I did the top 8 or so brokers and then stopped.

      • Sunsofold@lemmings.world
        21·
        2 days ago

        Quite. Some of them make it as difficult as possible, requiring the request to be physically printed and sent in via the post. Some hide the information regarding how to make the request as obscurely as possible. And essentially none of them treat it as a ‘and don’t collect any more’ request so they just start up a new collection on you the next time you do basically anything with one of their ‘business partners.’ Allowing people to request deletion is just the excuse they use to keep collection legal when it shouldn’t be.

      • lattrommi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        I used to spend one day each year doing all the opt outs and data delete requests i could find. it was going well for me until this year. i averaged about 2-3 spam emails a day, combined across 5 different emails, one was made all the way back in 1997 and two of them were made when gmail first started.

        someone got breached this year, i don’t know who, and now i get a lot more.

        i also used firefox monitor to check for info on breach websites and darkweb lists, around the same time i started getting more spam, my list of breached info went from ~16 to 600+.

  • 🌞🌞🌞@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    271·
    2 days ago

    If you want that service, don’t consider anything else besides EasyOptOuts, it’s both the cheapest and most effective option.

    • bl4kers@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      How is it the most effective option? They seem to cover less sites than others

  • ashughes@feddit.uk
    251·
    2 days ago

    Reject Convenience did a pretty good breakdown of DeleteMe, Incogni and the data broker industry on their YouTube channel a while back. It’s a good overview but, fair warning, it might send you down a bit of a rabbit hole after watching.

    video

      • doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml
        22·
        13 hours ago

        There’s already some really good replies, but think critically for a second about what you’re asking for:

        You want a summary of content made by “reject convenience” about the data broker and removal request industry, shouted into the void on social media, specifically on the insanely easy to infiltrate and subvert fediverse.

        Real black comedy posting hours who’s up?

        • Ech@lemmy.ca
          75·
          2 days ago

          A tldr isn’t sufficient to determine if something’s a scam or not. It’d be negligent/sketchy to include one.

        • Lytia @lemmy.today
          76·
          1 day ago

          Reject Convience does privacy policy reading streams, and has a pretty hard stance on no TLDRs. If you don’t have time to watch it, save it for later. Better that than to trust a random person’s 5 word TLDR.

  • Buffy@libretechni.caEnglish
    161·
    2 days ago

    If you have a Discover card, they offer a service like this for free. I’m not sure how good it is, but since they already have my information I figured it was fine to use their service instead of increasing my footprint by passing my info to another company. It also hasn’t found anything since I started using it because I did what they do manually, years ago.

  • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
    82·
    2 days ago

    There are several companies that do this.
    Even Mozilla did until this month.

    DeleteMe seems not to be the best. They might sell data to places while getting it removed from other places.

    I just signed up with Incogni which is one of the biggest.

  • SlicedPotato@feddit.dk
    84·
    1 day ago

    Several of the big privacy people have recommended them online, e.g. Techlore, so I’d say yes. Though it’s been a couple years since I saw those reviews, and I haven’t read up on them recently.

    EDIT: Grammar.

  • Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    3·
    2 days ago

    heard that stuff like deleteme and incogni sell your data to other places so if you ever stop subscribing so I’d avoid it myself 🤷

    you can do it yourself, find a list of brokers and send the same mail/pdf or whatever to them all