Privacy

31798 readers

164 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

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

submitted 3 months ago by slug@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] slug@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 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.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 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.

[–] slug@lemmy.world 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.