In collaboration with digital safety organization Tall Poppy, CR recruited 32 volunteers through its Community Reports program and attempted to remove their data from 13 of the most prominent people-search sites. Groups of four volunteers were each signed up for one of seven removal services—Confidently, DeleteMe, EasyOptOuts, IDX, Kanary, Optery, and ReputationDefender—and researchers tried to get information about the final group of four volunteers removed manually using the opt-out tools and procedures offered by the people-search sites themselves. Researchers then checked back to see whether the volunteers’ data had been removed after one week, one month, and four months.
The removal services generally had low success at removing the volunteers’ data. The researchers found a total of 332 pieces of personal information about the 28 volunteers who were signed up for the removal services. Only 117 of them, or 35 percent, had been removed after four months.
Some of the services did far better than others. EasyOptOuts and Optery did the best, with success rates of 65 percent and 68 percent, respectively, after four months. Confidently and ReputationDefender did the worst, at 4 percent and 6 percent, respectively.
None of the services were as effective as the efforts of the manual opt-out group. But even slogging through the process of manually requesting deletions worked only 70 percent of the time.
“That means that not even the time-consuming process of filling out the opt-out forms is going to get your info off all of these people-search sites,” says CR’s Grauer.
The removal services charge between $19.99 and $249 per year for periodic scanning and data removal. Notably, one of the two most effective services in CR’s study, EasyOptOuts, charges the least of the seven services CR tested, at $19.99 per year. (The other most effective service, Optery, charges $249 per year for the “Ultimate Tier” service that we used.)
The researchers also noted that some of the removal services advertise on or even appear to partner with people-search sites, raising the question of whether they have conflicts of interest. For instance, they found an ad for the removal service Onerep on the ClustrMaps people-search site. And after receiving an opt-out request from one of the participants, the people-search site PeopleFinders recommended “our partner, BrandYourself, for automatically opting your personal information out of other web sites.”
“At best, we see this as an implicit endorsement of the inherently problematic people-search ecosystem,” says Grauer. “At worst, it’s a perverse incentive to keep the system running in its current state.”
The researchers were quick to acknowledge the limitations of their study. In addition to the relatively small sample size and non-random process for choosing volunteers, they note that—in order to protect the volunteers’ privacy—the removal services were provided with a limited amount of information about each participant. Because some of the services will leave information online if they are not certain it belongs to the person requesting an opt-out, however, they may have been more effective if additional information or documentation had been provided. Some services, for example, ask for previous addresses, names and addresses of the subjects’ relatives, as well as uploaded images of the subjects’ driver’s licenses. None of these supplemental materials were provided as part of the study.
On the other hand, many users of these services may reasonably decide they would rather not share more information than required in the context of an ecosystem that has been collecting data about them without their consent.
It’s also worth noting that the researchers did not look back to see whether profiles that had been deleted reappeared later, which privacy researchers have sometimes found to be the case.
Chad Angle, chief executive of ReputationDefender, says that the company’s executive privacy services, which cost upward of $1,000 per year, are more comprehensive than the $99-per-year Privacy Pro product that CR evaluated, and that the removal process used by Privacy Pro “may not necessarily align with the sites you evaluated in your assessment.” And a Confidently spokesperson emailed that, over the past 6 months, the company has shifted its focus to corporate customers and expanded its service to cover data sources beyond data brokers and people-search sites. “We have not recently updated our retail service, but we will be refreshing that soon,” he added.
