ars posted this article today: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/its-not-worth-paying-to-be-removed-from-people-finder-sites-study-says/

takeaways:

1. the paid automated options don’t work very well
2. easyoptouts had the best success rate at (only) 65%
3. claims connections between the data sites and removal sites – i certainly saw a few ads on the sites but nothing points any fingers at any of the services mentioned in the comments here.

i ended up using kanary and optery in the free tier and doing the removals manually. but to follow up on my OP, there’s no service i’ve seen that goes any deeper than what comes up on google, which is disappointing. there are larger, private databases (such as lexisnexis) which was hoping to be able to get out of.

anyone else have experience with this one?

Yeah true. I think what I’m looking for is a reasonable cost/benefit/time investment, like maybe I’ll order a Kanary scan once a year and manually opt them all out. I did kanary this afternoon and the vast majority only had my voter registration info, but a few had attached my cell number which might be from the WhoIs data. If I can slow the spread of that for <$20/year I’ll feel satisfied.

I see the logic if I was continually making potential leaks (I guess we all are), but for trying to clean up a specific thing like my case, I suppose I can just buy one month.

very cool thanks

Checking them out, thanks. I kinda wish there was a different pricing model than a subscription for this kind of service.

edit; after signing up i can actually see within the free tier that there’s a “buy custom scan” option which might allow more piecemeal payments, gonna look into it

i just realized i set up ente but put the login for it in my bitwarden. that kind of defeats the purpose. so i guess i would need to save the ente creds outside of bitwarden… then i need a second 2FA source for that… endless cycle…

Ente looks really nice but I wish it had a Firefox addon

so much chinese text

:O

I know this is somewhat defeating of the privacy purpose but I use FF because of sync- is there an alternative that can use something like webdav to sync my bookmarks/history/etc between instances? e; i know floccus is around for bookmarks but i find history useful too

weirdly if you search “website advertising preferences” in the firefox setting search bar nothing comes up, you have to manually scroll to find it

since those are news feeds rather than people, i gotta shout out this Firefox add-on for finding people’s mastodon accounts after visiting their blog or other pages. it’s really cool: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/streetpass-for-mastodon/

edit-homepage with other platforms: https://streetpass.social/

some high-volume automated aggregator news feeds:

• https://mastodon.social/@Mediagazer@mstdn.social (media)
• https://mastodon.social/@memeorandum@universeodon.com (politics)
• https://mastodon.social/@Techmeme@techhub.social (tech)

and a personal fav: https://mastodon.social/@archaeology@mstdn.social