TIL that $40 subscription for deleting your online footprint does nothing if you already posted on a niche forum that never got archived

Paid DeleteMyTrace dot com 40 bucks after I got doxxed on a old music forum, but they couldn't touch the thread because the site shut down in 2016 and nobody backed it up, has anyone else gotten burned by these cleanup services?

3 comments

3 Comments

susan_adams24d ago

But what about the people who still have that old forum content on their own hard drives? @morgan_king36, that's a fair point about it not being archived publicly, but folks with old backups or even the forum admin might still have copies sitting around. I had a similar issue with a cooking forum that shut down in 2014, and someone had saved a PDF of the whole site on their personal drive. Those cleanup services can't touch local files no matter what they claim.

morgan_king3625d ago

Honestly, it sounds like you paid for a service that can't fix the real problem. If the site is gone and not archived, nobody's finding that thread anyway unless they're digging through old hard drives. Plus, most of those "cleanup" services just scan public stuff, so you probably didn't need to spend the cash at all.

the_drew25d ago

Not gonna lie, I was in almost the exact same boat last year with an old forum post from some random sports blog. Instead of paying for a cleanup service, I just went through the Wayback Machine and requested they remove the cached version. Took like a week and it was gone. Saved me whatever those services charge, which is usually way too much for something you can do yourself with a couple emails.