Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Services for removing your data from public databases (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Last year I did a major fuckup and bought a .us domain without noticing that they don't support WhoIs privacy, so my name number and address became part of the public WhoIs database scrapes. Since then my spam texts and calls have vastly multiplied. I'm realistic about the fact that the damage is done and it'll always exist out there, but I would happily pay some money to a service that sends takedown requests for the data in the public databases like LexisNexis etc. to lessen the damage. Do you know of any services that do this somewhat reliably? Or even a guide or something about doing this manually?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

This is one of the places where subscription makes sense, as they’re providing continual service. Although a one-time “clean it all up” followed by either a cheaper monthly plan or a retainer makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that a single leak spreads in ripples. You get it all taken down, but someone sells your data anyway, and it propagates to a whole new set of places. So then you need to get it all removed again. And invariably someone will sell your info AGAIN, and so you go through it during that round too. Eventually it fades out, but that can take years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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.