A side project we’re proud of
A while back, one of our founders got tired of two things at once: how many companies were selling personal data they had no business holding, and how much money the existing “removal services” charged to do something the law already requires brokers to do for free. He also had a nagging suspicion — one that’s hard to prove but increasingly hard to dismiss — that some of the same companies profiting from selling personal data were quietly profiting on the other end too, by charging people to make it disappear.
So he started building DataPurge in his spare time. It’s a free, open-source tool that generates legally-aggressive opt-out requests to over 700 data brokers — citing CCPA, GDPR, and 17+ US state privacy laws — and lets you send them with a single click each.
We want to be upfront about what this is:
- It’s a side project. Built by a founder in spare time, around the actual product work.
- It’s open source under MIT. The code, the broker registry, the email templates — all public on GitHub.
- It comes with no guarantees. Brokers change their opt-out flows constantly. Templates may need updating. Improvements are pending whenever there’s time to ship them.
- It’s completely free. No accounts, no tier upsells, no “premium” features. The whole point is that you shouldn’t have to pay anyone to exercise rights you already have.
If you find it useful, great. If you find a broken broker link or have an idea, the GitHub issue tracker is open.
What it actually does
The premise is simple. Data brokers — Spokeo, Whitepages, Acxiom, BeenVerified, and hundreds you’ve never heard of — collect, aggregate, and sell your personal information. Names, addresses, phone numbers, relatives, income estimates, political affiliations, employment history, even health inferences. They sell it to advertisers, insurers, employers, debt collectors, scammers, and yes, government agencies.
The law says they have to delete your data when you ask. The catch is that asking is deliberately tedious: every broker has its own form, its own verification steps, its own ignored emails. The asymmetry is the business model.
DataPurge flips that by doing the tedious work for you:
- You enter your name, email, and state. That information is stored in your browser’s local storage. It is never sent to any server. The tool serves templates with placeholders; your browser fills them in locally.
- It generates legally-backed deletion requests for every broker in its registry, automatically selecting the strongest applicable legal template based on your location (CCPA/CPRA for California, GDPR for the EU/UK, and state-specific laws for Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, Oregon, and more).
- You send them. One click per broker opens a pre-filled email in your email client. Or BCC all the brokers at once. Then track response deadlines and send noncompliance notices when brokers miss them.
The current numbers:
- 721 data brokers tracked
- 6 jurisdiction-specific legal templates
- 17+ US state privacy laws cited
The broker registry is CC0 public domain. The point isn’t to build a moat — it’s to make data brokering expensive.
Why this approach matters
Paid “privacy services” like DeleteMe and Kanary charge $100-$300 per year to do roughly what DataPurge does. They have nicer dashboards and they’ll keep nagging brokers on your behalf, which is genuinely valuable for some people. But the underlying mechanism — sending legal opt-out demands citing applicable privacy laws — is something anyone can do. DataPurge just removes the friction.
There’s also a deeper reason we like this model: every opt-out request costs the broker time and money. Every documented request creates a paper trail. Every explicit withdrawal of consent creates future legal liability as privacy laws continue to evolve. The economics of data brokering depend on collection being cheap and removal being expensive. Tools like DataPurge invert that.
What it doesn’t do (and won’t pretend to do)
Because we’re not a marketing brochure for a paid service, we can be honest about the limits:
- It doesn’t guarantee removal. Brokers respond at their own pace. Some ignore requests. The tool helps you track noncompliance and follow up, but enforcement still requires effort — or, ultimately, regulatory action.
- It doesn’t cover every broker that exists. New ones appear constantly. The registry grows through community contributions on GitHub.
- It’s not a monitoring service. It won’t actively watch brokers and alert you when your data gets republished months later — that’s the genuine value-add of paid services if you want one. What DataPurge does offer is quick lookups: you can re-run the tool any time to check brokers and generate fresh requests in minutes, which is enough for most people who want to do periodic sweeps themselves.
- It can break. Brokers change their opt-out URLs and email addresses without notice. If you find a broken link, report it on GitHub and it’ll get fixed when there’s time.
Your data stays on your device
This was non-negotiable in the design: a tool for opting out of data brokers shouldn’t itself collect data. So it doesn’t.
- No accounts
- No cookies
- No tracking pixels
- No analytics
- No server-side storage of your information
Your name, email, and state are stored in your browser’s local storage. You can clear them any time. The email templates are static files served from the site; the substitution happens in your browser. Nothing about you is transmitted anywhere.
You don’t have to trust us on this — the source code is on GitHub and the tool runs entirely in your browser. Inspect the network tab. There’s nothing to send.
How to use it
- Go to optout.iamnottheproduct.com
- Click “Start Purging”
- Enter your name, email, and state (takes about a minute)
- Review the generated deletion requests
- Click to open each in your email client, or BCC them all at once
- Hit send
That’s the whole thing. Setup is about two minutes. Sending takes longer depending on how many brokers you process — but you can do it in batches over multiple sessions, and the tool remembers your progress locally.
What’s coming next
DataPurge is still very much a work in progress, and a few improvements are already on the roadmap:
- A dedicated app or web app. The current flow lives inside an email-client handoff, which works but isn’t the smoothest experience. Packaging DataPurge as a standalone app (or a more app-like web experience) would make sending and tracking requests much easier, especially on mobile.
- Easier email forwarding and address privacy. Sending opt-out requests currently reveals your real email address to every broker you contact — which is ironic for a privacy tool. We want to integrate email aliasing or forwarding so you don’t have to expose your inbox just to exercise your rights. One idea we’re exploring is a shared-email pool that automatically rotates aliases once a month, so brokers see a different address each cycle and you stay anonymous.
- Donations and volunteers. We’ll be opening up donations soon to help cover hosting and ongoing development. In the meantime, we already accept volunteer contributions — both to add new data brokers to the registry and to validate processor details (opt-out URLs, contact emails, response behavior) so the tool stays accurate as brokers change their flows. If you’d like to help, the GitHub repo is the best place to start.
A small contribution to a bigger fight
We don’t think a side project is going to dismantle the data broker industry. That’s going to take legislation — like the FISA Data Broker Loophole Reform Act currently working through Congress — and serious regulatory enforcement. The GDPR-only-works-where-enforced study makes clear that laws on paper aren’t enough.
But while that fight plays out, individual opt-outs still matter. Every removed record is a record that can’t be sold to a debt collector, leaked in a breach, fed into an AI training pipeline, or pulled by a government agency without a warrant. The data that doesn’t exist is the data that can’t hurt you.
DataPurge exists because one of us couldn’t stand watching people pay hundreds of dollars for a service that should be free. It’s imperfect, it’s incomplete, and it’s improving slowly as time allows. But it’s there, it works, and it costs nothing.
Try it: optout.iamnottheproduct.com Contribute: github.com/puurpl/datapurge Report a broken broker: open an issue
If you want to help, the most useful contributions are reporting brokers we don’t cover, flagging opt-out methods that have stopped working, and improving legal template language if you have privacy law expertise. Spreading the word also helps — the more people who opt out, the more expensive data brokering becomes.