Just hijacking the top comment to point out that Optery's onboarding process is deliberately misleading in an attempt to get you to subscribe to a paid tier.
I signed up as "Notareal Personxxx." I listed my city as "Detroit, MI." I'm shown a list of 202 domains under the heading "Websites exposing your personal information." I click "More information" next to one of the listed websites. A modal appears:
>> Notareal Personxxxx, Detroit, MI,
<Yes, that's me> <No, I'm not there>
See screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/Z2M8y3d
Pretty sure you are not the only person to ever say my name is "Notareal Personxxxx" in detroit. The internet is a very large place and has been around for a pretty long time at this point with billions of people entering "real" info into forms all over the world every day. If just one person did it before you, and that one persons info got collected and sold, you have the situation you are seeing.
No comment on if the service is real or whatever, just that your "test" is flawed.
Thanks again for pointing this out. As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, this is a product experience defect, and is not intended to be deceptive. We made a few quick cosmetic updates to mitigate until we can re-work our dashboard more meaningfully. For example:
1) We changed the data broker dashboard title from "Websites exposing your personal information" to "Websites that expose personal information"
2) We changed the data broker dashboard subtitle from "Discover where your personal data is exposed..." to "Explore where your personal data might be exposed..."
3) Within the data broker dashboard subtitle, we added the text "Links frequently lead to empty pages" with a "learn why" link to the post on our Help Desk titled "What if a "View" link leads to an empty or not found page?" that goes here:
https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-link-leads...
We have several more changes we're working through to address this issue. Thank you again!
This is a product experience defect, and not intended to be deceptive. Several comments have cried “foul” on this one and we hear it loud and clear. We apologize this has persisted in the product, and can definitely see how this can be misleading.
To explain what’s happening from the inside, immediately after the sign up, we retrofit the profile data you’ve input at the signup process into our URL templates for each data broker. This provides an immediately actionable link you can click on to see if your profile is present on the other end at the data broker. Meanwhile, our automated scanner starts running to see if it can actually find your profile at each data broker. After about 1 hour, a PDF report is emailed with ~70 (on average) places on the web that your profile has been found.
What’s often really confusing, and that we definitely need to fix in the UI, is when the user starts clicking on the links and they find “no profile found” they think that something’s gone wrong, or that we’re trying to be deceptive. Even more confusing is when a dummy name like "Notareal Personxxx" is input, the links are still there for you to click through.
The defect in the product is that the UI assumes a large number of matches for each user will be found, typically 50 – 100 on average. Everything in the UI is framed up with that assumption. However, when there are only a few results, or in the extreme case where a fake name is input, and there are no results at all, the UI still frames everything up as if it were for a typical user with 50 – 100 matched profiles. The other reason this product defect has persisted is because our Free Basic users use the links to QA their own self-service opt out work. So after they’ve submitted their own opt out, they want to be able to click through the link and see that the profile is gone. This is why most people use the product with glee, but when a link leads to a “page not found”, at best people are confused, and at worst they cry “foul” of deception.
I love Show HN and Launch HN threads because the builders get so much rich feedback like this on how to improve the product. This is the best feedback that we’ll take with us and start hammering away on immediately. Thank you!
We do have a Help Desk post describing what’s happening with these links, but we need to update it and make it more clear based on this feedback. You can find a little more information on how these links work here:
https://help.optery.com/en/article/what-if-a-view-leads-to-a...