Why we’re partnering with EasyOptOuts

Unsubscribing only works on mail you can trace back to somebody.

There’s a sender, there’s a list, there’s a link at the bottom of the message, and Leave Me Alone finds all of it and gets you off it in a couple of clicks. That covers most of what clogs an inbox, and it’s the job we’re good at.

It doesn’t cover where your details came from in the first place.

Your name is a product

There’s an entire industry built on publishing you. People-search sites list your full name, your home address, your phone number, your age, your relatives, and everywhere you’ve lived. Then they sell that file to anyone who wants it, over and over, forever.

We should be straight about this: that’s not mainly an email problem. Email is one of the smaller things on the invoice. The bigger outputs are the calls, the postal junk, and the fact that anybody who wants to find out where you sleep can do it for about twenty dollars. It’s also the raw material for the more targeted kind of fraud, the message that knows your street name and your mother’s first name and so gets past the part of your brain that would normally throw it away.

So it isn’t the same job we do. It’s the job upstream of ours. We clean out the inbox. EasyOptOuts goes after the record that keeps refilling it.

Small companies have simpler incentives

We don’t think small businesses are automatically more ethical than big ones. But the incentives are cleaner, and incentives are what actually decide these things.

A big platform hands you the product for free, then answers to advertisers, shareholders, and a growth target every quarter. You’re not the customer in that arrangement, you’re a line item.

A small independent company charges you money for a thing, and that’s the whole business. You’re the customer, so your interests and theirs point the same way. It’s why we charge the way we do for Leave Me Alone. It keeps us honest, because we don’t have another way to make a living.

So we want to back other companies that work like that. Partly because we like them, and partly because there aren’t many of us, and we’d rather we were all still here in ten years.

Why EasyOptOuts

• It’s cheap on purpose. $19.99 a year, covering 200 or so data brokers and people-search sites. Most of this industry charges five or ten times that for the same idea. The footer of their site reads “Built for privacy, not to pay back investors”, which is a sentence we enjoyed rather a lot.
• It keeps going. This is the part people underestimate. Brokers put your record straight back, because scraping you again is cheap and there’s no penalty for it. So EasyOptOuts re-runs the whole search and removal process three times a year, every four months. A one-off cleanup would be close to pointless.
• It’s automated end to end. Nobody’s file gets handed to a contractor somewhere to fill in the forms by hand. The opt-out requests are submitted by software, and they share the minimum a broker needs to find and remove you.
• Somebody independent checked. Privacy Guides, who have no reason to be nice to anybody, tested the category and wrote: “Our testing indicates that EasyOptOuts provides the best value out of any data removal service we’ve tested, with a very affordable price and high effectiveness.”

The deal: 25% off EasyOptOuts for Leave Me Alone members

This one runs both ways.

If you’re a Leave Me Alone paid subscriber, you get 25% off EasyOptOuts for as long as your subscription runs, not just the first year. Claim the coupon from our partners page: enter the email address on your Leave Me Alone account and we’ll send the code to your inbox. Each coupon covers up to five sign-ups.

One honest limit: EasyOptOuts works on US data brokers, so the deal is for US customers. If you’re in the EU or the UK, this one isn’t for you, and we’d rather say so here than let you find out at checkout.

If you’re already an EasyOptOuts customer, your Leave Me Alone deal is on their Extras page: 10% off the 7 day Pass, 45% off the Yearly Casual plan, or 65% off the Yearly Inbox Zero Hero plan.

Neither company earns a penny on the other’s sales. The discount is what an affiliate commission would have been, handed to you instead.

Frequently asked questions

Is this an affiliate deal?

No. Neither company earns anything from the other’s sales. The discount replaces what would normally be a commission, so the value goes to you.

How do I claim the 25% off EasyOptOuts?

Go to our partners page, enter your Leave Me Alone account email, and we’ll send the coupon over. It holds for as long as your EasyOptOuts subscription runs.

Will this stop my spam?

Not on its own, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Getting your record pulled down cuts off a supply line, but it does nothing about the mail already arriving at your address today. That’s the half we handle. The two jobs sit either side of the same problem, which is why we’re doing this at all.

Does it get me off every site?

No, and they don’t claim it does. Privacy Guides notes a handful of sites EasyOptOuts doesn’t cover, and recommends opting out of those yourself. Coverage in this industry is a moving target, because the brokers move too.

I’m not in the US. Can I still use it?

Not usefully. EasyOptOuts covers US data brokers and sells to US customers.

I use EasyOptOuts. What do I get?

Head to their Extras page for your Leave Me Alone discount, up to 65% off our top plan, which includes unlimited unsubscribes for life.

More to come

We’d like to do more of these. There are a handful of small, independent, privacy-first companies we already use ourselves, and we’d rather send you to them than to whoever’s paying for the top ad slot.

No promises on who or when. But if you’re already paying for Leave Me Alone because you want your data left alone, it seems smart for us to point you at the other people doing the same job elsewhere.

If there’s a company you think we should be talking to, send us an email.