I went through hell to get all my info off the web and I still don’t think I succeeded. But this gives me hope:
“MelonCard, a tiny Mountain View startup that launched earlier this week, aims to solve that privacy problem by offering a kind of universal opt-out controller for those personal data collectors. And though it’s hardly the first to promise that digital holy grail, it is promising a new price, at least for its basic services: free.
“‘We want to change the whole conversation about privacy,’ says the company’s 27-year-old chief executive Robert Leshner. ‘The tools out there for managing your information aren’t good enough, and we think we can disrupt the market.’
“On MelonCard.com, users can enter a few of their identifying details like name, zip code, and email address, and the service will pull up a page of people search engines and data aggregators, each with a handy ‘remove’ button that use each search engine’s or aggregator’s individual opt-out function to delete your data from that company’s database. When more data is required for those opt-outs or the user is required to fill out a CAPTCHA, MelonCard loads all those entry fields onto the same universal opt-out page.”
MelonCard Promises To Remove Personal Data From The Internet–This Time For Free, by Andy Greenberg, Forbes, November 3, 2011