Seven years ago, I typed my own name into a search engine and was horrified to learn that my name, age, home address, and phone number were publicly posted by multiple people-search sites without my knowledge, let alone consent.
Shortly after finding my own data online, I started maintaining a data broker opt-out list for people who wanted to manually remove their own information from people-search sites. I’ve been updating it since 2017, as new sites keep cropping up and existing sites change their opt-out processes.
People-search sites are largely unregulated, have generally opaque practices and operations, and can be confusing and time-consuming for consumers to navigate. Given that, it’s easy to understand why people would prefer to pay to have someone fill out forms and solve captchas on their behalf.
We joined forces with Tall Poppy, an organization that builds tools and offers services to help companies protect their employees against online harassment and abuse, to evaluate seven different people-search removal services. We recruited 32 participants from Community Reports, enrolled them in people-search removal services or manually opted them out in a control group, and evaluated the results.
Today we’re releasing the full report of our findings.
Please reach out to me if you have any feedback at yael.grauer@consumer.org.
