ars posted this article today: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/its-not-worth-paying-to-be-removed-from-people-finder-sites-study-says/

takeaways:

1. the paid automated options don’t work very well
2. easyoptouts had the best success rate at (only) 65%
3. claims connections between the data sites and removal sites – i certainly saw a few ads on the sites but nothing points any fingers at any of the services mentioned in the comments here.

i ended up using kanary and optery in the free tier and doing the removals manually. but to follow up on my OP, there’s no service i’ve seen that goes any deeper than what comes up on google, which is disappointing. there are larger, private databases (such as lexisnexis) which was hoping to be able to get out of.

anyone else have experience with this one?

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.

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.

very cool thanks

Checking them out, thanks. I kinda wish there was a different pricing model than a subscription for this kind of service.

edit; after signing up i can actually see within the free tier that there’s a “buy custom scan” option which might allow more piecemeal payments, gonna look into it

i just realized i set up ente but put the login for it in my bitwarden. that kind of defeats the purpose. so i guess i would need to save the ente creds outside of bitwarden… then i need a second 2FA source for that… endless cycle…

Ente looks really nice but I wish it had a Firefox addon

i’ve tried it, it’s soooo overdesigned. linkding works for me

i run ABS as a web based manager for drm free audiobooks but the player itself is just totally unreliable, i download the files and add them to BookPlayer on iOS

:O

I know this is somewhat defeating of the privacy purpose but I use FF because of sync- is there an alternative that can use something like webdav to sync my bookmarks/history/etc between instances? e; i know floccus is around for bookmarks but i find history useful too

weirdly if you search “website advertising preferences” in the firefox setting search bar nothing comes up, you have to manually scroll to find it

i’m genuinely curious about some alternatives to this sort of surveillance to solve issues like CSAM etc., which aren’t “it’s the parents responsibility”. section 230 reform? links to further reading appreciated.

i’d love for a good tech journalist to look into how and why this is happening and do a full write-up on it. come on ars, verge, vice

these numbers are nearly reaching the point where buying seasons of shows on iTunes, which always seemed insanely expensive, becomes the better option for people who watch specific stuff. never thought I’d see the day

update: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/16/lbry-closes-odysee-cryptocurrency-tech-sec-fraud-extremist

youtube suggestions are genuinely terrible for the individual and humanity as a whole

wow, i completely missed this the last time i tried out calibre-web, if it was even integrated. awesome, thanks. i also found this guide: https://code.mendhak.com/kobo-customizations/#syncing-kobo-with-calibre-web

as in it pulls everything you add to the calibre library on a schedule rather than pulling individually/manually like from OPDS? how do you pull this off?