You may have the feeling that online privacy is a thing of the past. Advertisers and mega-corporations seem to know what you eat, what you like, maybe even what you think! They don’t really have ESP, though. They’re just good at online profiling or at buying profiles from data brokers. These totally legal brokers just scrape the internet for information that they can package up and sell. You can tell them to erase your data, and legally they have to comply, but there are so many! Services like Optery handle the task of finding your data online, getting it removed, and verifying the cleanup. Optery handles more brokers than most, gives you more detail about found profiles than the competition, and even makes a free version available with practical DIY opt-out instructions.
How Much Does Optery Cost?
In a sense, Optery costs what you’re willing to pay. At the Basic protection level, for no payment whatever, and no requirement to enter a credit card, it will search 115+ sites for your basic data, show you precisely what it found, and explain how to get that data removed. Shell out $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year for Core protection and you get help—Optery automates removal from the 95+ biggest people search sites, with visibility and DIY removal instructions for the service’s full list of 190+ sites. At this level, it can track variations on your name, multiple phone numbers and email accounts, and addresses where you’ve lived in the past.
The Extended subscription costs $14.99 per month or $149 per year. It raises the number of sites for automated removal from 95+ to 115+. Naturally, it still gives you visibility into all 190+ sites that Optery tracks, so you can manually remove data from any not covered automatically.
The only difference between Core and Extended is the number of sites for automated removal. At the Ultimate level, you get a bit more. And you should get more, given that it costs $24.99 per month or $249 per year. At this level, Optery handles all the removal requests. You also get custom removal requests, meaning you can ask Optery’s agents to remove you from sites it doesn’t normally cover, and they’ll make their “best effort” to do so.
Optery calls the Extended edition the best value, but I think the Core edition may be still better. In either case, you’ll have to do some of the removals manually. Extended costs half-again as much as Core, but only adds about 20% more sites.
What Do Competing Products Cost?
Until I encountered Optery, Privacy Bee was the most expensive data-removal product I knew, at $197 per year. It does offer a free edition that reports on brokers that have your data, but getting that data removed requires payment. Privacy Bee offers a variety of other privacy-related services including notifying thousands of merchants about your privacy preferences.
Abine’s DeleteMe was among the first services to help users escape the clutches of online data brokers. Like Privacy Bee, it relies on human agents to keep the removals going smoothly and handle any tasks that can’t be automated. You pay $129 per year for that service or $229 for you and your partner. There’s also a $329 option that’s good for a family of four.
Optery doesn’t have family pricing, at least not right now. However, the company does presently offer discounts of 20% or 25% for family groups. Each family member must manage a separate account. One Privacy Bee user can manage accounts for multiple family members, but each account costs the full $197.
The Kanary charges $89.99 per year to clear your data from various aggregator sites; you can go month-to-month for $9.99 per month. Family protection is a bargain with The Kanary, $129.99 per year to protect up to six people. This product makes a free scan available, but in testing, it proved too limited to be of any use.
A month of IDX Privacy costs $9.95, about the same as The Kanary, with a yearly price of $79.95. IDX Privacy does quite a bit more than remove your info from data brokers, though. This suite also includes Dark Web monitoring, identity theft remediation, a full-fledged Virtual Private Network, (VPN), and more.
Almost all these services work by finding your personal data online, having it removed, and confirming its absence. Incogni, from VPN-maker Surfshark, works differently. It sends official removal requests to a list of brokers that might have your data, and it accepts their responses as proof that they removed the data, or never had it. By the month, Incogni costs $7.99, but you can cut that in half by paying for a whole year at once.
Avast BreachGuard’s focus is monitoring the Dark Web for breaches involving your data. As a bonus, it broadcasts removal requests to its list of data brokers, much in the way Incogni does. Its price is low, just $39.99 per year, but its broker list is tiny. It covers barely more than a dozen brokers as of our last review.
Optery and Privacy Bee both have a free edition that confers useful benefits. Optery’s least expensive paid tier costs about half Privacy Bee’s price, and the middle tier is still below that price, but its most expensive tier goes for more than Privacy Bee. These two are the big guns in the personal data removal field.
Getting Started With Free Optery Basic
As noted, anybody can sign up for Optery at no charge, and with no requirement to enter credit card details. It’s just plain free, at the lowest service level. You start by entering your first and last name, email address, and a password.
Optery also requires your city and state of residence as well as your birth year. The entry page notes that without at least this much detail Optery can’t distinguish you from others with a similar name. Your full birthdate and middle name aren’t required, but entering those is recommended.
That’s it; on finishing data entry you go straight to the results dashboard. The dashboard’s summary at top doesn’t have a lot of information for free users. Data Brokers Covered isn’t going to change from 0, nor is the number of Total Data Brokers. Optery won’t remove data for you at this tier. What’s important is the big list of brokers.
This list includes all the brokers that Optery tracks, with columns of information about each. The first column indicates which plan is the minimum for automatically clearing personal data from the site. The second, Exposure Risk, is only relevant to paid plans. What’s more important to free users is the Link to Profile column.
Ignore items that show the status Upgrade to view; Optery doesn’t check those for Basic users. The interesting ones have the word View, with a picture of a link. Clicking that link takes you to the broker, where you can look around to see if your info is present. Optery builds in a warning, pointing out that you’re leaving the Optery site and entering that of a data broker. The warning notes that you should never give personal information to the broker, and never give any money.
Initially, I thought this link was supposed to go straight to my profile on each broker, but that proved incorrect. Out of 71 brokers with a View link, exactly one highlighted my profile and another six highlighted profiles of other people with similar names. My contact at Optery explained that mine was a common misunderstanding and that they’re working on messaging. He noted that these links let Basic users “quickly double-check their own work and quickly verify whether their profiles have been removed,” and that Optery has patented the techniques used in deriving those links.
The real fun doesn’t start until Optery delivers your first Exposure Report, which takes around an hour. I spent that time poking at the View links. I was surprised to find that I couldn’t sort by the corresponding column to put all those with a View link together. My Optery contact confirmed that’s a known bug and will be fixed.
As noted, I found that some of those links pointed to profiles, though some of those profiles turned out not to be me. You can open each item in the list and click to confirm that the found profile is or isn’t yours. The expanded item also shows the opt-out email and opt-out web page for the site, where available.
Free Data Removal With Optery
Optery’s real strength becomes apparent when it finishes its initial exposure assessment and supplies you with an Exposure Report. In my case, the dashboard showed 10 profiles found. According to my Optery contact, that’s very low. The typical new user turns up 70 or more profiles. But the low count is no real surprise, as I’ve tested several other products promising to clear my personal data from brokers. Clearly some of them worked!
Optery sends an email when the report is ready. You can click a link in the email, or just select Reports from the online console’s left-side menu. Open the report and prepare to be amazed.
Unlike any other product in this field, Optery doesn’t just state that your data was found, like IDX Privacy. It also doesn’t simply list the found data items, like DeleteMe. Rather, the report presents you with a screenshot of your actual profile data on the site.
That’s not all. In many cases, clicking that screenshot takes you to the corresponding profile page at the data broker. Optery hasn’t managed that magic for all the tracked sites, but when it works it’s amazing. In my case, the link performed flawlessly for a little more than half the found brokers. For the other half, I had to manually search for my info.
Now comes the painstaking part for those who are not paying customers. For each broker that has your data, you must switch from the report back to the main Optery list, open the corresponding item, and use the supplied opt-out email or opt-out URL to request removal of your data. After you’ve done that, set a reminder in your calendar to open the report every few weeks until all the brokers have complied. If you have more time than money, this is an economical way to protect your privacy.
Benefits of a Paid Account
Unless you choose the very top tier, Ultimate, you still may wind up sending and tracking some opt-out requests manually, as described above. However, even at the lowest-paid tier Optery handles opting out from the most common and active brokers.
It’s smart to start with a free account, to get a feel for the system, but Optery will find more hits for paying customers. That’s because you can expand on the information in your basic profile. You can enter all names and nicknames you’ve used, register additional phone numbers and email addresses, and let Optery know about previous addresses. You can also list relatives or other associates with whom you’ve shared an address.
As with the free account, you must wait a little while for Optery to do its work. When my account went premium, the Dashboard list of brokers did change a bit. All entries in the Exposure Risk column changed to say Search in Progress except for those already found under the free account. Those changed to Personal Info Found Exposed.
Checking the Removals in Progress tab I found nothing active, not right away. The note at top said I could expect progress in the next 24 to 72 hours. Indeed, the next morning I found that Optery had been very busy. The Protection Progress & Status chart showed 20 removals in progress and 28 more pending. The remaining 145 either never had my information or already had it removed. The Exposure Risk column identified which status matched each broker. To narrow the list, I could choose to view only Removals in Progress or Removals Completed.
In a real-world situation, I would now put Optery on the back burner and let it do its work. After 30 days it would present me with the crown jewel of the service—the Removals Report. The Exposure Report shows screenshots from sites that have your data, with links to let you see that data right on the site. With the Removals report, you see what was found along with a new screenshot demonstrating that the data was removed, and a link to verify the removal. No other personal data removal service I’ve seen gives you this level of verification.
I wasn’t prepared to shelve this review and wait 30 days, so I asked my Optery contact for an example Removals Report. As you can see in the screenshot above, the report clearly shows what data was present at the initial detection, and it also shows that data is no longer present. What more could you ask?
Who Handles the Most Data Brokers?
The best cleanup process in the world won’t truly help your privacy if it only applies to a limited number of data brokers. Just which brokers do the various products track? Delete Me publicly lists the brokers it tracks, all 38 of them. Optery not only lists all its brokers (currently 193) but breaks down the list by which ones qualify for automatic removal at each subscription level. I asked the other companies and received lists from Privacy Bee (232 brokers), IDX Privacy (100 brokers), and Incogni (76 brokers). I didn’t get a list from The Kanary, but I created a partial one using the data items of mine that it found.
I wound up with a list of 425 brokers, two thirds of which were only listed by one of the privacy products. Incogni is an outlier; only two brokers from its list appeared in lists from Privacy Bee and Optery; the rest were singletons, not of interest to any of the other privacy services.
In terms of sheer numbers, Privacy Bee and Optery both eclipse DeleteMe and IDX Privacy, especially DeleteMe’s puny list of 38 brokers. Of DeleteMe’s list, Privacy Bee covers two thirds and Optery covers three quarters. For IDX Privacy it’s flipped—Optery covers two thirds from that list and Privacy Bee covers three quarters.
The lists from Privacy Bee and Optery do have more than 100 brokers in common, but that means each has a significant number not covered by the other. In the end, what’s important is how many brokers actually have your personal data. You might consider signing up at the free tier for both, just to see. Note that while Optery gives you a report within a few hours, Privacy Bee can take much longer to report its findings.
Beyond Data Broker Cleanup
Optery focuses strongly on finding data brokers that hold your personal data and either removing that data for you or showing you how to opt out for yourself. The Kanary solely aims to find your personal data online, though in testing, it found data on quite a few sites where removal was inappropriate, sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. Incogni, too, is focused solely on removals, though it doesn’t check for your info’s presence or absence.
Managing data brokers is just one task of many for IDX Privacy. It monitors the Dark Web to make sure your personal info isn’t up for sale, and it keeps an eye out for abuse of your social media accounts. It includes a basic Virtual Private Network (VPN). And it backs its identity theft recovery services with a million-dollar guarantee.
Avast BreachGuard also watches in case your information surfaces on the Dark Web, though it restricts its monitoring to your email address. It reports on data breaches and monitors new breaches. It handles data removal the way Incogni does, without actually verifying it, and its list of brokers is barely over a dozen.
That leaves Privacy Bee, which has the biggest list of managed brokers. Even bigger is the list of non-broker businesses whose privacy agreements this company’s human agents have analyzed. You can use it to fine-tune your trust relationships with thousands of businesses. Like Avast AntiTrack, Ghostery Privacy Suite, and Norton AntiTrack, Privacy Bee comes with a browser extension that blocks ads and other trackers. It helps its users with opting out from common spam-generating lists, credit card pre-approvals, and more. It clearly has the biggest feature set of the bunch—it’s just a question of whether you want to use its features.
Privacy Protection, Free and Verified
Without requiring any payment, Optery finds data brokers that hold your personal information and offers seriously useful help so you can perform the opt-out process yourself. You can choose to subscribe at three different price tiers, in which case Optery automates removals for some, more, or all the brokers it tracks. After it does the job, it provides a report that lets you see exactly what it found and verify that the info is no longer present. You could hardly ask for more from a service aimed at clearing your personal data from online data brokers.
Optery handles more browsers than almost any competitor, but Privacy Bee has an even bigger list. It, too, has a free tier, though it’s not very helpful to DIY privacy fans. And it doesn’t provide the same detailed verification Optery does. But it goes farther, with a tracker-blocking browser extension, the ability to control your privacy settings with thousands of companies, and more. It does a lot, for those who can afford it. Privacy Bee is definitely a good choice.
Overall, though, Optery’s handling of the core data removal task outshines the rest, and its free tier brings privacy protection to those who can’t afford expensive subscriptions. In the realm of personal data removal, Optery is our Editors’ Choice.
