Originally Posted On: June 27, 2021
We are alums of data brokers Oracle Data Cloud, BlueKai, and Lusha, and also of Y Combinator (Screenleap (W12) and Cleanly (W15)), now working hard to help consumers opt out and remove themselves from data brokers. We’re excited to share what we’ve been building and hope you’ll try it out as part of your online privacy defense toolset 🔨.
How Does Optery Work?
If you sign up (free), we show you where your information is being sold and exposed online at 200+ people search sites – things like your home address, cell phone, email, birthdate, family members’ names, estimations for income and net worth, ethnicity, religion, political affiliations, and past addresses. Our dashboard provides dynamically generated custom deep links you can click through to view your profile at most of these sites. After you sign up, we produce a customized Exposure Report sent directly to your email with screenshots of ~70 – 80 sites posting your info.
People’s jaws usually drop when they realize how much of their personal information is openly posted by these sites on the public internet 😲. We then provide free and paid options to have your profiles removed from these sites.
We only support U.S. residents at this time.
Why Should I Care?
If you’ve ever Googled yourself and seen results from companies like InstantCheckmate, TruthFinder, Spokeo, ArrestFacts, InfoTracer, Intelius, CellRevealer, MyLife, WhitePages, FreePhoneTracer, etc – these are the types of sites we give you visibility into and remove you from.
These sites are used to find long lost friends, but they’re also used by identity thieves, hackers, spammers, phishers, doxers, swatters, stalkers, criminals and lawyers to act against you 🥷. If you care about your digital privacy protection posture, you can reduce your surface area for attack by removing your personal information from these sites. But it all starts with a solid risk assessment of what’s out there on you.
What’s Cool About Optery?
- If you’re interested in finding out where your profile is being posted and sold at the people search sites, there’s no better tool than Optery. You can click through dynamically generated custom deep links to your profile from our dashboard, or just sit back and wait for your Exposure Report with screen shots to be delivered by email after you sign up for free. For each user, we typically turn up 2X – 5X more profile match results than Google, or any of our competitors like OneRep, DeleteMe, LifeLock, PrivacyBee, and IDX Privacy, and with significantly less noise in the results 🧐.
- If you care about removing your information from these sites, whether you use our Free Basic account to learn where your profile is posted online and submit the opt outs yourself, or you sign up for a paid plan where we submit the opt outs on your behalf, we will save you loads of time ⏳.
- With a paid plan, you can check the status of your opt out submissions and removals progress in your dashboard in realtime, on data broker, by data broker basis. You can also configure your account to receive weekly or monthly status reports by email. Our competitors generally deliver status reports quarterly, don’t provide real visual proof of anything with screenshots the way we do, and don’t have realtime dashboarding capabilities 😱.
- Most data brokers require an email address to process an opt out request. With a paid plan, we autogenerate custom email addresses for your opt out submissions that we manage for you behind-the-scenes, so your inbox is spared and your personal email address is never shared with any data brokers 👤.
How Is Optery Different From Competitors?
Our product is built by world-class engineers with years of experience working at top technology companies, and we’ve developed the most advanced data broker visibility and opt out platform on the market. No competitors on the market provide the level of detailed visibility that we do into what your profile looks like on a data broker, by data broker basis, starting with the People Search Sites category. If you’re already using a competing service, you can sign up for Optery’s Free Basic account and use our free visibility tools to double-check their work and keep them honest – in almost every case, we will find exposed profiles they have missed! Here’s more on how we’re different from the companies we hear about the most:
- DeleteMe – per DeleteMe’s web site “A standard DeleteMe subscription will remove your information from 30+ data broker websites.” In practice, they cover about ~40 for $129/year. Optery’s lowest tier plan covers 100+ data brokers starting at $9.99 per month, and our Ultimate plan covers 210+ data brokers. DeleteMe basically only covers data brokers where the opt outs are really easy to complete. What they really excel at is marketing, but they provide a false sense of security typically leaving their paying customers with 20 – 50 profiles out on the web exposed. DeleteMe provides extremely limited visibility features. We’re able to provide a lot more value because we automate discovery and opt outs to a much greater extent.
- PrivacyDuck (Note: the PrivacyDuck web site has been taken offline after its founder tragically passed away) – they prided themselves on doing everything manually, but there was no software interface for any kind of dashboarding or realtime visibility into anything, and because everything was done manually, they charged a high price point, offering two plans – one at $499/year and one at $999/year. They were a white-glove, no-tech service, and provided a PDF status report. Their founder Will McAdam was a pioneer in the privacy industry, may he rest in peace.
- OneRep – they were founded as a People Search data broker, and are owned by a Belarusian ownership group that plays both sides of the field simultaneously running the People Search Site data broker Nuwber, and the privacy opt out service OneRep, which is a major conflict of interest. Questionable ethics aside, they do have a competitive product covering ~100 data brokers, provide some basic data broker visibility (albeit not very accurate), and at a lower price point than others. Consistent with the questionable ethics, a lot of their business comes from their affiliate partnerships with, get this, other data brokers. For example, if you opt out of the data broker ClustrMaps, ClustrMaps will push you to a OneRep affiliate partner link encouraging you to sign up for a OneRep privacy plan so they can both generate a sale from a user that is in the midst of submitting opt outs. i.e. you’re indirectly paying the data broker ClustrMaps money to opt out!
- BrandYourself – per BrandYourself’s web site “We’ll remove your personal info from 35+ data broker websites.” Similar to DeleteMe, they provide a false sense of security typically leaving their customers with 20 – 50 profiles exposed on the web and they charge $299.99/year. Optery’s lowest tier plan covers 80+ data brokers, and our Ultimate plan covers 150+ data brokers, whereas BrandYourself basically only covers data brokers where the opt outs are really easy to complete. Similar to OneRep, they also provide some basic visibility into where your profile is exposed at a few data brokers (though not even in the same ballpark as what we provide at Optery). Similar also to OneRep, BrandYourself works with data brokers as affiliate partners – along with OneRep, this calls into question their integrity and ethics, and is reason alone to exclude them from your short-list.
- PrivacyBot – this is a tech-enabled free Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solution for people that (a) are comfortable installing and running programs on their machine at the command line, (b) are based in California (the emails PrivacyBot generates rely on California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) rights requests), (c) have a Gmail account, AND (d) have the time and inclination to respond to and manage the email back-and-forth with dozens of data brokers. By comparison, Optery (a) is run as user-friendly and modern SaaS application in the cloud that anyone with a web browser can access, (b) can be used by residents of any state in the U.S., (c) is completely email agnostic (in fact, we never share your personal email with any data brokers, and instead create a custom email for you that’s used to communicate with data brokers), (d) is intended for people who place a premium on their time, as we manage all the back and forth with the data brokers, and (e) provides detailed visibility into what information of yours is displayed at ~100 data brokers, which PrivacyBot does not touch at all from a functionality perspective.
How Can I Try It Out?
Signing up is free and there’s no credit card required for our Free Basic account.
Click here to sign up: app.optery.com/signup