It’s all about how proactive you want to be. Generally you can do it for free if you know where to remove data from. The people search engines make it intentionally complicated to find their removal links and they make it like an 18-step process unnecessarily. See https://www.removemyphone.com/learn/intelius-removal-guide for instance. That said, I wish some (not all, but some) European style personal data protection laws were on the table for discussion in the US. I’m not sure if the US can manage good privacy laws without benefiting big corporations over smaller social media upstarts, so I think we’re mostly stuck with this state of affairs here.

> 7. Periodically repeat the previous steps. As their data sources and crawlers can find your data again, there's always a possibility that your data will show up again in the future. Monitoring it for the long-haul is super important.

Oh I laughed so hard on that 7.!!! Why can't they just sinkhole your name/number/data so that anyone trying to add you it will be auto-deleted?? Nice scummy behaviour, but I guess they simple call this "business/operating model".

Same reason you pay for trash removal of physical junk mail that’s delivered to your house

In Germany you can put a „no ads“ sticker on your mailbox and it works. In case someone puts ads into your mailbox anyhow, you can report them to the consumer protection agency and they risk a fine.

This actually works.

When I lived in Austria, I had ads hanging on my doorknob almost every day. I was amazed at how many I got when I would leave for a week.

US should do same. Make spammers deliver their junk mail themselves, lightens the load on the USPS and creates direct jobs.

Junk mail is responsible for a good chunk of USPS revenue

Well, I lived in Germany for a long time and had that sticker on my mailbox, but still got them. Though less than anywhere else, so it does scare some, but not all of them.

technically you could try putting RETURN TO SENDER on all your junk mail and put them back in a blue collection box.

https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-Options-Do-I-Have-Regard...

It's crossed my mind before to start a service that collects junk mail and sends it to the home address of the executives at the junk mail aggregates (there's only a handful of them last I tried to stop receiving junk).

On the one hand it's definitely harassment to find out someone's address just to send them things they don't want for the purposes of changing their behavior. On the other hand, that's their business model.

Now that I would pay $129/year for.

brilliant

How else should they monetize their service? Remove you from data brokers lists and then sell your data right back to them?

How much is your time worth? Doing it manually is a pain in the ass and takes a lot of time. Deleteme is not perfect, but they do a pretty good job. Customer since 2010