In brief: You’ve likely seen plenty of ads on the internet for services that remove you from people-search sites – data brokers that collect information from public records, commercial data sources, and social media platforms. Some of these companies charge a lot of money for their work, but a new study suggests they’re not really worth it.
Consumer Reports (CR) highlighted the trend of people-search sites that collate publicly available data on individuals and make it easily accessible. They’ve led to the rise in services like DeleteMe and Confidently, which claim to remove customers from these sites.
To test seven of these services, CR asked 32 volunteers for permission to remove their profile data from 13 people-search sites across the space of four months.
The bottom line is that while using these companies did result in participants’ private information on people-search sites decreasing, and the process was quicker than manually opting out, only 35% of the 332 identifying profiles were removed.
The services, which have annual costs ranging from $20 to $249, vary in their effectiveness. Confidently ($120 per year) performed worse, removing just 4% of profiles within four months, while the most expensive of the group, $249 Optery, removed most profiles (68%). Interestingly, the cheapest of the group, $20 per year EasyOptOuts, was the second-best performer, removing 65% of all profiles.
The most effective way of removing profiles from people-search sites is to opt-out manually. This resulted in 70% of profiles being deleted within a week.
There is currently no federal law giving consumers the right to opt-out of people-search sites. CR selected volunteers from California, which recently signed the Delete Act into law that allows consumers to request universal deletion of their information from more than 500 registered data brokers with a single click. It also picked volunteers from New York, where there are no similar laws.
CR discovered during its opt-outs that some people-search removal services advertised on or even partnered with the people-search sites. An example came when removing volunteers’ data from ClustrMaps, which led to a suggested step of signing up for privacy protection service OneRep.
“We see this as an implicit endorsement of the inherently problematic people-search ecosystem,” CR wrote.
The people-search sites that were best at complying with the data removal services were PeopleFinders, ClustrMaps, and ThatsThem. The three worst were CheckPeople, PublicDataUSA, and Intelius.
Masthead: Glenn Carstens-Peters
