I think we all know by now that companies are constantly collecting — and selling — our data.
What might not be top of mind are “people-search sites” that pull your data from a number of sources into one profile that anyone can pay to access. Not just spam callers or Facebook. Anyone.
So, there are companies that offer to remove your personal data from these websites for a fee. Prices can range from about $20 to $249.
According to a recent evaluation from Consumer Reports, many of these services are “largely ineffective.”
CR worked with 32 volunteer participants and, over the span of four months, tested the effectiveness of seven people-search removal services by seeing how well they took data off 13 people-search sites.
Researchers checked removal progress from these search sites at one-week, one-month and four-month intervals.
Removal services EasyOptOuts and Optery performed the best, with success rates of 65% and 68%, respectively, at the four-month mark. EasyOptOuts was actually the least expensive one too, at $19.99 per year.
Confidently (4%) and ReputationDefender (6%) had the worst performance of the group.
Although a bit more time-consuming, manually sending opt-out requests to people-search sites was more effective than paying for data-removal services.
Those who manually opted out had 70% of their data removed within the first week. In comparison, participants using the removal services had 0% to 58.7% of their data removed in that time frame.
CR says the people-search sites PeopleFinders, ClustrMaps and ThatsThem were the best at complying with removal service requests, and CheckPeople, PublicDataUSA and Intelius were the worst.
If issues like this are a concern for you, CR has developed some free tools you can take advantage of.
Permission Slip, a free app, lets you review the data that websites and companies are collecting and offers help to protect yourself. Then there’s Security Planner, a service that provides a personalized data security plan.
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