How we research these pages

Our pages on data brokers, opt-outs, data breaches, scams and privacy terms tell you how to protect your personal data. Here's where the facts come from, how we check them, and how to tell us when something is wrong.

Where the facts come from

We only use official sources:

  • The company's own opt-out, privacy and help pages
  • State data broker registries
  • Have I Been Pwned for data breaches, used under its CC BY licence
  • Regulators and law enforcement, such as the FTC, the FBI's IC3 and national fraud agencies
  • The laws themselves

We don't use competitors' or vendors' pages as sources. Each page lists the sources it was checked against.

How a page is made

  1. We draft the page with the help of AI, working from those sources.
  2. Automated checks run next. Every fact has to trace back to a source, competitor and vendor sites are blocked, and the page has to follow our style rules.
  3. A person reviews every page before it's published. Their name is at the top of the page.

How we keep pages current

We re-check every page against its sources about every three months, and each page shows when it was last checked. If a company's website stops loading or moves, we flag the page and say so on it. When we check an official page, we save a screenshot of it, and some pages show that screenshot.

Data from Serus

On data broker pages we show one figure from our own removal work: how many removal requests Serus sends, on average, for each person who removes their data with it, and what share of those requests go to data brokers. It comes from Serus's internal removal records, is rounded, and never includes customer numbers. We update it as new figures come in.

How we make money

Serus is a privacy company with paid tools to find and remove your personal data. Our guides show the free, official way to remove your data yourself, and what they say doesn't depend on whether you buy anything.

Corrections

If you spot a mistake, tell us through our support page. We'll check it against the source, fix the page and note the correction.

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