I have been upset recently by a colleague googling me and found my full name on several 3D Printing sites I used to use. I guess I signed in with my google account and so it just pops up now that I’ve deleted all my socials.
I have a fairly uncommon first + last combo so the cursory google search and then sending “delete my data” emails from the email they know from the 3 data brokers who popped up seems good and now just my linkedin is showing (this is the ideal state).
Is there more I’m missing? should I go for a deleteme subscription in case I missed anything? Other sources I should go to?
I really don’t mind sending my own emails to these pests, but is that really all the services are doing? Or is there a backend I’m missing?
I think easyoptouts is worth it ($20/quarter). It has like a 70% success rate which will decrease a ton of grunt work for you. There are a lot (well north of 150+) of these data sites to try and manage.
Just because you remove data once does not mean it won’t be put back on the site later which means you need to make a habit of constantly rechecking the sites if you chose to do it yourself.
I would also recommend signing up to have Google alert you when your name comes up in searches. This will make it easy to remove them from Google and let you know what you still have to remove.