My colleagues on Engadget’s shopping advice team have great recommendations for physical gadgets like this simple fabric shaver that are on sale for Black Friday. However, I’m an evolved creature swimming in the digital ether, so my top product of the year remains online only – although DeleteMe will still make your life better no matter where you are. From now until December 5th, DeleteMe is offering 30 percent off all subscriptions with coupon code BFCM30OFF25,
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Membership is reduced to $7.50 per month for Black Friday.
Save $39 with code
$90 at DeleteMe
Chances are you’ve come across at least one public-facing “people search” site. You know them: They usually have names like 411.info or Find.people, and you can type in a person’s name and get all the information the site is able to get from them. If you discover your own name, it’s hard to resist immediately heading to the kitchen to make yourself a tinfoil hat. The most annoying thing is that these “data broker” sites are completely legal to run and use.
However, this is also his Achilles’ heel. If they want to operate out in the open, brokers are legally required to include a way for you to remove yourself from their database. Most of them make it as painful and time-consuming as possible, but the option exists.
That’s where DeleteMe comes in. All you have to do is sign up and enter all the data you want to remove from the brokerage sites. DeleteMe takes care of the rest. It looks up your information on people’s database sites, automatically sends opt-out requests, harasses the broker if they don’t comply quickly enough, and gives you a weekly report on how it’s doing. You’ll have to keep your data fine with DeleteMe, but I trust them more than the rando at Violation.Privacy.
This is much faster than handling all the opt-out requests yourself, which – if you’ve ever tried it – quickly becomes a full-time job. Since I’ve been using DeleteMe, I almost never get spam calls or texts anymore, except when its crawlers leave little asides before they catch my name on another site. And yes, it doesn’t work on shady data brokers who don’t follow regulations, but it’s still a huge reduction in your online footprint.
The only problem is that it’s quite expensive, so I strongly recommend jumping on this Black Friday deal. A few months on DeleteMe should be long enough for you to see if it reduces spam for you – and I’m betting it will.