Thank you for your suggestion to “set up a personal demo… to address my concerns”. I’d prefer that you don’t flag credible critical comments regarding your service and answer them in the open. The comment that you’ve flagged contained links to screenshots that prove 1) you use scam mechanics; 2) your service does not work as advertised (if works at all).
Yes, I have a difficult time understanding why your service finds 168 “links” on data broker sites for a bogus name search. If your service performs a real time scan of data broker sites, it should find 0 profiles when it searches for a bogus name. Please answer a simple question why this is not the case.
Some proofs once again:
https://postimg.cc/rD93R2TG (Search results for non-existing name and city on data brokers sites)
https://postimg.cc/BXpdLb2s (Non-existing profile on addresses.com Optery dashboard report links to)
It doesn’t matter when I created my HN account and how many comments I have. What matters is you wrote blatant lies on your site: “Our dashboard provides dynamically generated custom deep links you can click through to view your profile”. Even if some links are real, the majority are not. Sad.
So, your explanation basically confirms that right now your dashboard shows fake results. You call these results “autogenerated profile link at [data broker site] for [name at city, state].” Instead of a link which “you can click through to view your profile” as advertised on your site, many of those links lead to 404 or some random page on a data broker site because your system has found nothing. In case of a bogus name, 100% of those links are fake. I call them fake because they are what they are - imitations of “found” results.
Just to clarify, a “bogus name” test is a quick way to check if a privacy service does a real search on data broker sites or just imitates that it found something. For a bogus name I’d expect to see 0 profiles found as a result of a scan. That would be logical and ethical.
To sum up, you invite people to register at your service and give away their PII. Then, these people get fake results in exchange for their PII and are invited to sign up and pay. Then, a user expresses her concern to the founders and they say that it is ok for a privacy service to act like this.
At least Optery is useless and a waste of time, at worst this service is unethical. With this type of reaction from founders, I’d think twice before sending them any personal data or having anything to do with them at all.
Looks like a scam.
I’ve subscribed to see if Optery is able to at least scan those 150 sites they promise to remove listings from. The dashboard showed they found me on 168 sites. Some results contained links to data brokers. Tried to follow some of them - they returned either 404 or data broker’s page without my information.
On their site Optery says “Our dashboard provides dynamically generated custom deep links you can click through to view your profile at most of these sites.” I got suspicious and registered once again to check how bad things are. This time I searched for a fictitious name from a fictitious city: John Queizi9Joot9Eiyohkeigh4Cohtae2Ae from Konohagakure, CA. Optery “found” this person on 168 sites once again. Lol, same 168 results for me and for fake me.
So, what we have here: Optery looks like a fake. They disparade working tools while having no working tool of their own. Looks very much like a PII collecting masking itself as a privacy service.
Yes, I have a difficult time understanding why your service finds 168 “links” on data broker sites for a bogus name search. If your service performs a real time scan of data broker sites, it should find 0 profiles when it searches for a bogus name. Please answer a simple question why this is not the case.
Some proofs once again: https://postimg.cc/rD93R2TG (Search results for non-existing name and city on data brokers sites) https://postimg.cc/BXpdLb2s (Non-existing profile on addresses.com Optery dashboard report links to)
It doesn’t matter when I created my HN account and how many comments I have. What matters is you wrote blatant lies on your site: “Our dashboard provides dynamically generated custom deep links you can click through to view your profile”. Even if some links are real, the majority are not. Sad.