Midea Is Voluntarily Recalling Our Favorite Air Conditioner
To be fair, this can happen with any air conditioner. 'I'd venture to guess that upwards of 70 percent, maybe more of the AC units and mini-splits we encounter, if you took a flashlight and looked at the fan, you'd see mold,' Gabriel Erde-Cohen, CEO of We Clean Heat Pumps, told us. 'Sometimes, the mold is just more apparent.'
We began reporting on this concern in summer 2023. We tried and failed to replicate a mold issue ourselves, and we disassembled our own Midea U in order to better understand its airflow and identify some problem points. We also reached out to Midea to ask about the issue. The company's answer confirmed our findings: The fan, and thus any mold growth on it, is more visible in the U than it is in other ACs. Also, the problem can be more prevalent in rooms where people have installed oversize air conditioners, a practice that we discourage. We then wrote that the remedy, for many people with an appropriately sized AC, is to keep the fan running to dry out moisture and make sure the AC is tilted slightly backward to help with drainage. The blue, barrel-shaped fan on the Midea U is visible through the grille — and getting past the bars to clean it is difficult. To help prevent mold growth, keep the fan running regularly. Thom Dunn/NYT Wirecutter The internal fan is harder to spot in traditionally shaped window air conditioners, such as this GE Profile model. Thom Dunn/NYT Wirecutter The Midea U, like most window ACs, should tilt back slightly (on a secure mount) to help excess water drain out, discouraging mold growth in the base pan. Michael Hession/NYT Wirecutter The blue, barrel-shaped fan on the Midea U is visible through the grille — and getting past the bars to clean it is difficult. To help prevent mold growth, keep the fan running regularly. Thom Dunn/NYT Wirecutter
Meanwhile, complaints to Midea persisted. At least two people filed formal complaints with the Consumer Product Safety Commission about the mold problem. (Many such complaints are posted publicly at SaferProducts.gov.)
We don't know when Midea started looking into the issue, considering that it's been evident for years, or why this particular action is happening now. But we did speak with Jonathan Midgett, PhD, the consumer ombudsman at the CPSC, who serves as a sort of public liaison for the agency's internal processes. Although Midgett wasn't familiar with this particular case, he did say that a two-year timeline would be reasonable for a company to investigate these sorts of complaints and develop a plan of action to address the problem. 'Sometimes complaints do take years to get traction,' he explained. 'You get one or two and just ignore it, then there's three or four, and now it's looking like there might be a pattern.'
Companies do have some responsibility for mold mitigation, according to the CPSC. 'I know that it sounds like it's not a mechanical failure, but it is a mechanical failure if there's something wrong with the plastic or there's not enough airflow to prevent mold growth,' Midgett told us, citing a 2013 mold-related recall of nearly one million Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play sleeper cribs.
We tested multiple sizes and types of air conditioners to confirm: A too-big AC can't balance heat and humidity.
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New York Times
15 hours ago
- New York Times
Our Privacy Expert Tried, and Failed, to Disappear From the Internet
Published June 25, 2025 By Max Eddy Max Eddy is a writer who has covered privacy and security—including password managers, VPNs, security keys, and more—for over a decade. A b o u t a d e c a d e a g o , I s t o p p e d h e a r i n g f r o m a n o l d f r i e n d o f m i n e . T h e y h a d a h a b i t o f d i s a p p e a r i n g . I ' d b e c o m e u s e d t o t h e i r d r o p p i n g o f f t h e m a p , s o m e t i m e s f o r y e a r s . T h e y ' d a l w a y s p o p u p a g a i n w i t h a n e w e m a i l a d d r e s s o r u s e r n a m e a f t e r a w h i l e . B u t n o t t h i s t i m e . Explore all articles Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter I had long known that they were a deeply private person, but their desire for privacy never seemed to affect our friendship. We'd catch up over direct messages or meet for coffee as if no time had passed. But this time, their disappearing act seemed to have stuck. I tried to track them down by using search engines and combing social networks, and I figured something would turn up. But I was wrong. They had ceased to exist — online at least. Disappearing is a tough trick when almost anyone who knows your name and a few identifying facts can potentially find your home address, cell phone number, family members, and other personal details — a reality that is at the very least disquieting, if not dangerous. Not to mention other sources of personal information, like photos that appear on company websites for jobs you've long left, class pictures from schools you graduated from decades ago, or snapshots from a family reunion posted by a distant relative. Taking those down might require some rather awkward conversations. O n c e y o u r i n f o r m a t i o n i s o n t h e i n t e r n e t , r e m o v i n g i t c o m p l e t e l y i s a l m o s t i m p o s s i b l e . But, in part because I was inspired by and curious about my disappearing friend, I decided to try. As a privacy journalist, I have given all manner of advice for how to secure and obscure an online life, but I'd never undertaken a project that extends the idea of privacy to its logical conclusion: by disappearing completely. So I set out to erase my online life. I failed. Finding myself (online) The most obvious way to see what everyone else can easily learn about you is by Googling yourself. Type in your name, followed by 'address' or 'phone number,' and you'll likely find websites that list your personal details for anyone to see. Google offers a tool to take down some search results containing your personal information, but doing this only prevents the information from appearing in a search — the original sites still have your information. Many of these websites are owned by data brokers, which compile files about individuals from a variety of sources and then sell that information to whoever wants it. Getting data brokers to take your personal information down is possible, but you have to navigate through each broker's process manually. Or you can use a data-removal service, such as our top pick, DeleteMe, which automates the process for you (for a fee). Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter Looking at data broker sites, I was shocked to see my old email addresses, current and former home addresses, and phone numbers up for sale. But the information wasn't always accurate. I found several Max Eddys who lived at an address that was close to, but not exactly, where I grew up in Michigan. I also came across Max Eddys who were older or younger than me but were linked to my parents, siblings, and cousins on these websites. Perhaps these people do exist, or perhaps they were invented as a result of errors and mismatched data. In the eyes of data brokers, we're all interchangeable. The Best Data Removal Services I tested nine data-removal services and used them to remove my personal information from data broker websites. So far, much of my information has been taken down, with only a few crumbs of correct information and old photos that persist on some data broker sites. But after spending hundreds of dollars and weeks of my life on this effort, I still haven't fully succeeded. Some sites might never take the information down, and DeleteMe's co-founder Rob Shavell told me that some data brokers may start selling my information again in the future. Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter With nearly a dozen data-removal services hard at work removing me from data broker sites, I next tackled online accounts that I had created for myself. These included the obvious ones, such as Facebook and Instagram, but also all the others I'd created over the years that I'd completely forgotten about. Deleting them was obviously the easiest option, and it would have gone a long way toward actually removing myself from the internet. But I believed that keeping my online accounts alive and inactive, but with less personal information, might actually be preferable, as doing so would make it much harder for someone to fill the void created by my deletions by impersonating me. Let me explain. I came up with a plan to create what experts call 'synthetic data,' or made-up information about myself. If I were to continue to use the same information between accounts — username, email address, contact info, real name — it would be easier for companies and snoops to connect the dots back to the real me. Instead, I would use a text generator to come up with unique names and screen names and generate random bitmap images to replace profile photos so that my online accounts couldn't easily be connected back to me. I consulted Bill Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who suggested that opting for even a slight variation on a name makes it harder for people to find you. Most online accounts require a functional email address, so I decided to replace my real email address on each site with a unique masked one to make myself harder to find. Here's how it works: If you have my email address (say, you can probably deduce who I am across a constellation of websites by looking for it. But if I change the one I use for X to aer2ao7vs@ and my address on Instagram to t1aes76r3@ and so forth across all my accounts, it becomes much harder for other parties to draw connections. You can create masked email addresses with a service like Apple's Hide My Email or the Firefox Relay tool, both of which create burner email addresses that forward messages to a personal email account. Gmail allows you to make small changes to your email address, such as adding '+' followed by any phrase, but I found masked emails easier to manage. For each account, I planned to remove as much personal content as I could, including photos, comments, and posts. I didn't want to leave up any information that a snoop could use to find me, my family, or my friends. But I was also eager to shed the baggage of 25 years of living my life online. I'm certainly not the same person who tweeted about trying out a new music service called Pandora for the first time in 2007. Your Data Appeared in a Leak. Now What? I am a security journalist, so perhaps unsurprisingly, I've been using a password manager for close to 15 years. I combed through Bitwarden, Wirecutter's budget-pick password manager and my personal favorite, to see how many accounts I had signed up for. The answer was a staggering 356. I needed to trim that list to something more manageable, so I turned to Have I Been Pwned, which lets you search data breaches for your personal information. I prioritized the accounts that I knew had been exposed to data breaches (about two dozen), and then I added about 30 more that I thought were likely to have personal information such as my address, date of birth, and financial details. 'Starting with where your accounts are and where they've been compromised is like hygiene that most people don't do, but should be doing,' Shavell told me. Confronting the past With my plan in place, I started scrubbing my accounts from websites I barely remembered using. Patreon? Gone. Gravatar? Sure, why not. Kickstarter? Kicked to the curb. An ancient WordPress blog I don't remember creating? Scrubbed clean, hopefully before anyone noticed that it existed in the first place. Other sites I had completely forgotten about, such as the beer-rating app Untappd, or had never actually used, like Nextdoor — the latter of which I did actually just delete. Erasing my online social life proved to be more challenging than I'd expected in about every way; even just getting into the accounts was challenging. Photo-album site Flickr was once a photographic repository of my life, but the website wouldn't let me log in. When its password-recovery process failed, I found an option to submit different versions of photos I had stored in Flickr to prove I was the owner. I was able to get back in, but other people might not be so lucky. Then it was time to delete LiveJournal. I hadn't recalled posting or interacting much on the online-diary website, so I was gobsmacked to discover that I had written hundreds of entries. I decided to keep those mementos of past me, even the ones that had aged like milk, but downloading them to save them offline wasn't easy. I found an option to export the entries as a spreadsheet, an almost avant-garde choice for storing prose, but I could download only one month's worth of data at a time. Share this article with a friend. Downloading the posts was exceptionally tedious — and then I had to manually delete each post. It took over three hours to delete two years of my life. Tackling X, formerly known as Twitter, proved to be another taxing task. I'd made my first tweets by text message, patiently pushing the keys of a flip phone to find the right letters. I had 103,000 tweets, 40,000 retweets, and 130,000 likes that I needed to remove. Deleting the account would have taken mere seconds, but I wanted to keep the account alive but inactive to ensure that no one would try to impersonate me in the future. Preparing to delete my data from X, I was reminded of my friend who had vanished from the web. Even in the early 2000s, they were careful about their online presence. They used Twitter, but they deleted their tweets and changed accounts regularly. If I posted something about them, a picture or even just a passing reference, they called — on the telephone — and politely asked me to take it down. I thought it was odd at the time, and I sometimes resented it a little. Now, facing down the task of deleting over 100,000 tweets, I think they were on to something. There was no way that I could possibly remove that many posts on my own. So I enlisted the help of Cyd. An open-source tool, Cyd (which stands for 'claw back your data') automatically deletes X posts, interactions, bookmarks, and direct messages. Based on my experience, Cyd can clear out 70,000 tweets in about three and a half hours. You can find other tools for deleting old tweets, such as TweetDelete, but I opted for Cyd because I'd had a good experience using it to clean up a personal Twitter account. I also liked that Cyd didn't need to store any of my personal information; the entire process is managed in an application on my computer, not a service on the cloud. Smart TVs, Cameras, Speakers and More Are Fishing Nets for Your Data. What Are They Catching? Watching Cyd work was mesmerizing. My posts flashed by almost too fast to read; it was like watching my life pass before my eyes. It was fun to revisit my posts at warp speed, but painful, too, because each time something appeared on the screen, it was also being deleted. Photo from my wedding? Gone. Photo of my pet rat, Pepper? Gone. The process made me choke up a bit. On to Meta. I had seen scammers impersonate my family members on Facebook before, so retaining control of my Facebook and Instagram accounts was critically important. Meta does provide the option to temporarily 'deactivate' Facebook and Instagram accounts instead of deleting them. That might be a good option for anyone who might return to using these platforms, but I preferred keeping my accounts alive but empty. Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter Watching Cyd delete my tweets was painful, but watching the contents of my Instagram account disappear was excruciating. Cyd doesn't work on Instagram or Facebook (though the latter will be supported soon, the Cyd documentation says), so I used a macOS app called Automator to record and repeat mouse movements and clicks. I recorded myself deleting one Instagram photo and then put it on a loop to take care of the rest. (The downside: I couldn't use my computer while it ran.) The automation was still running that evening when some friends came by for dinner, and I showed it off. They were initially impressed, but it started to feel awkward. 'Oh,' said one. 'This is going to start deleting pictures of me soon, isn't it?' They quickly went back to the kitchen. Taking on Facebook was by far the most difficult aspect of this project, and where I had the least success. Deleting or temporarily deactivating Facebook wasn't a good choice for me because, like many people, my relatives use the social network to stay in touch, and those options would have prevented family from finding me on the platform. I tried to apply what I had learned so far, but I discovered that Facebook's settings are a nightmare to work through. Powerful options are available, but the process of finding them and using them, amidst pages and pages of settings and educational material, is byzantine — Kafkaesque, even. I discovered that you can retroactively limit who can see your posts, as well as prevent search engine and image search of your content. You can also pull up a log of your interactions on the platform, which lets you delete comments that have become problematic with age. I frequently struggled to trace my own steps to figure out how I took some actions. Even now I'm not sure. When I changed my Facebook profile photo, I selected one that shows my face but is also warped to be bizarre and off-putting. I felt clever, like I'd outsmarted the social graph, but within minutes it got several likes and comments. I forgot that Facebook promotes every change you make to your friends. I had blundered into feeding it more content. Share this article with a friend. I then came across hundreds of photos and copies of all my Instagram pictures in my Facebook account. I tried to automate deleting them, but that didn't work. In the end I spent several hours rhythmically clicking — and I understood all too well why most people don't attempt to do this. Finally, after days of combing through Facebook, I succeeded in removing most of my information. The only remaining photos on my Facebook page were those I was tagged in by family and friends. Here, I struggled. What would they think if I removed the tags? I asked my spouse for their thoughts: 'I untagged myself from every picture years ago,' they told me. 'Tags are stupid anyway.' But even if I were to remove the photo tags, the photos would still be on Facebook. The only way to actually get rid of them would be to ask my family members to delete them. I dreaded this, and I worried that they would feel like I was rejecting them. And so I posed the question as a hypothetical to two relatives: Would they be upset? Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter To my surprise, both told me they would have absolutely no problem removing the pictures. Both said they had dramatically changed how they used social media in recent years. One had already removed most of their old posts and doesn't add anything new, except to private family groups. The other still posts but made all their old and new posts private. Both expressed a deep distrust in sharing their lives publicly these days. Taking down a photo upon my request wouldn't be hurtful, they said, because the picture lives offline — they can look at it whenever they want. This project had me concerned about other people's feelings — what would my loved ones, friends, and even acquaintances think if I asked them to remove artifacts of me? How would they respond? I n t h e e n d , o n l y o n e p e r s o n — m e — s e e m e d t o m i n d . One enormous repository of my social life escaped relatively unscathed from my efforts to delete myself. Foursquare, a social network where people voluntarily checked in to locations like shops, restaurants, and airports, was once a favorite app of mine. Nowadays, companies are more likely to siphon this information quietly from your phone with far greater geographic accuracy, but Foursquare gamified and socialized the experience when it launched in 2009, and I was a frequent user. Stripping it of information linked to me was easy, so it's unlikely to be found in a simple Google search, but short of deleting my account I couldn't find a way to hide or remove my hundreds of check-ins. But I also discovered that I didn't want to. Browsing the list, I could see all the Tuesdays I spent at the Burp Castle, the bar where I briefly held the 'mayorship' on the Foursquare leaderboard. Little icons on my check-ins showed that friends had joined me, including the person I would eventually marry. My mayorship might be long gone, but simply erasing this running record of years of my life didn't sit right with me. So I didn't. The information you can't scrub clean The experts I spoke with, and my years of reading on the subject, had all suggested that public records were the upstream sources for the reams of personal information found on data broker websites. I was able to find my information in public records, and much of it was worryingly comprehensive, but it wasn't as accessible as I expected it to be. It also wasn't easy to remove. I own my home, so I was able to pull up my property records using some surprisingly user-friendly tools on my local government's website. Depending on where you are registered to vote, your voter record can include personal details, such as your current address. But I could access property and voter records only one at a time, and I needed to know a lot about a specific person to access those records. The largest trove of personal information I found was in records for political contributions. Using the Federal Election Commission's search tools, I pulled a list of people who contributed to presidential campaigns from the past 16 years. I easily found records that showed a name, employer, and contributions. But when I downloaded the data, I found that the document included full addresses, as well. Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter Budington and other experts I spoke with recommend visiting your municipal records office to ask what information is publicly available on you, and to see if there is any option to have it removed or limited. A friend of mine said that they had some success removing some minor information from their voter record in their relatively small town, but I had less luck in my city. I consulted my local municipal records bureau website, which instructed me to first reach out electronically before scheduling an appointment. The records bureau responded quickly but said that because my request pertained to records of property, by law it could be only corrected for errors, not removed. The agency that manages local elections told me that it is possible for a voter file to be made private, but only in the event of domestic violence. Share this article with a friend. The FEC told me that there was no option to have my data removed once it had been reported, but I was also told that the data cannot be used 'for the purpose of soliciting contributions or for any commercial purpose,' although there are instances where the data can be used. However, the FEC said that 'individual contributors [don't have] to divulge personal information if they choose not to do so.' The downside of disappearing Googling my name is less terrifying than it used to be. The data brokers with the top Google results no longer list me, and the ones that do might eventually give in to my data-removal requests. And I ceded the top Google result for my name — Max Eddy — to a comedian named Maxx Eddy. (Congratulations, Maxx.) I still have work to do. Searching for my usernames still pulls up accounts I have yet to remove. You can still see my photo and byline on old employers' websites, which I'll likely leave alone since it helps prove that those stories were written by Max Eddy the security journalist, not someone else. But there's less information about me out there that I don't control, and I have a framework for clearing out old accounts and creating new ones that aren't troves of identifiable information. 'Ultimately it's not futile,' said Peter Dolanjski, director of product at the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo. 'Taking some steps to protect yourself is better than doing nothing.' Deleting my digital history was painful. I felt like I was both erasing myself and also preventing people I care about from reaching out to me to reconnect. I couldn't bring myself to sever the potential of future contact, as my vanished friend did. Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter A few months ago, I tried to find them again. I called every phone number, searched every username, and emailed every address I could find, but nothing worked. I reached out to mutual friends — even to strangers who had been cc'd on the same emails — and came up with nothing. This person clearly doesn't want to be contacted. I looked for my friend one last time while writing this article, and I found a photo of them from middle school posted on a school-district website. After all of our efforts to disappear, traces of my friend — and of me — still exist online. Making it harder to find yourself is clearly effective — even if you don't vanish entirely, scrubbing your internet trail makes it more difficult for data brokers, strangers, and malicious actors to find your information. Some digital artifacts will always remain beyond your control and could pop up in surprising ways. But maybe you don't need to completely erase yourself from the internet to disappear. Sometimes people get the message. This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.
New York Times
15 hours ago
- New York Times
The Best Data Removal Service Can Help You Scrub Your Internet Presence
Michael Hession/NYT Wirecutter By Max Eddy Max Eddy is a writer who has covered privacy and security—including password managers, VPNs, security keys, and more—for over a decade. Updated June 27, 2025 If you've ever Googled yourself — who hasn't? — you've probably found your personal information for sale on websites belonging to data brokers. These companies collect phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and even information on family members, and then sell your information to anyone willing to pay. You can manually submit opt-out requests to data brokers yourself, but there are hundreds of them. Data removal services do the heavy lifting for you — for a price. After testing nine services, we've concluded that the set-it-and-forget-it design and reasonable pricing of DeleteMe make it the best choice for most people. Our budget pick, EasyOptOuts, has fewer features, but for $20 a year, it provides a cheap and easy way to improve your online privacy. DeleteMe is easy to set up and even easier to use: For $129 a year, you receive periodic reports on what data it has removed on your behalf, but otherwise it does the work for you. The most interaction you'll have with a data removal service is when you enter your data, and DeleteMe does an excellent job of streamlining this process. It's comprehensive — covering names, addresses, and even relatives — but flexible enough that you don't need to remember every little detail to reap the benefits. Once you've done your part, you might never need to interact with it again. DeleteMe sends periodic reports that list what information it found and what steps it took to remove your data. EasyOptOuts matches its barebones design with an affordable annual price. It's the cheapest data removal service we've tested, and it gets the job done. EasyOptOuts is a less flexible service than others we tested, and it provides minimal information about the data it has removed on your behalf. But the price, just $20 a year, makes it easy to overlook this basic service's limitations. If you're interested in getting your personal information off the internet but reluctant to pay the high price of other services, EasyOptOuts is a solid option. Explore all articles I'm a senior staff writer at Wirecutter, covering security, privacy, and software. I have reviewed products designed to safeguard online privacy for 13 years. For this guide: I researched 16 data removal services and enrolled with nine of them, granting them as much information as they requested. I personally evaluated those services over a period of two months. I designed a long-term testing experiment to evaluate the efficacy of data removal services. Five Wirecutter staffers will be using the services for at least a year to inform our recommendations. Anyone concerned about their online privacy may benefit from a data removal service. If you type your name with 'address' or 'phone number' into a search engine, there's a good chance you'll find data brokers who have your personal information for sale. Although you can sometimes manually request that these brokers take your information down, doing so is a tedious process that you need to repeat for each data broker. Data removal services promise to handle the nitty-gritty of removing your information from data broker sites for a fee. They also keep looking for your data across the galaxy of data brokers and continue filing removal requests as long as you pay for the service. But even using a data removal service doesn't completely scrub your online identity. A representative of EasyOptOuts told us that data brokers may repost information that has been taken down, though whether that happens is unpredictable. The rep also told us that the company doesn't believe its service will lead to people getting fewer spam calls, so set your expectations accordingly. Also, not every data removal service is available to customers outside the US — DeleteMe is available in 11 other countries, but EasyOptOuts is US-only. Data brokers aren't the only source for your personal information. Many people routinely provide lots of information about themselves on social media platforms, which use that data to serve targeted ads. Advertisers, like data brokers, are keen to learn as much as they can about you, and they use a variety of tools to try to track you between websites, which is why we recommend using a tracker blocker such as Privacy Badger. Once you start taking control of your personal information with a data removal service, build on that momentum to start improving your security hygiene, too. Using a password manager and enabling two-factor authentication wherever it's available are two easy ways to make yourself safer online. Share this article with a friend. We considered the following criteria when making our picks: A standalone tool: Some data removal services are bundled together with other tools, such as VPNs and antivirus. Although such packages might provide subscribers with more utility, we focused on companies that provided data removal services without additional, questionably useful features tacked on. Some data removal services are bundled together with other tools, such as VPNs and antivirus. Although such packages might provide subscribers with more utility, we focused on companies that provided data removal services without additional, questionably useful features tacked on. Easy, flexible data entry: The most interaction you'll have with a data removal service is giving it your personal information, so the ideal data removal service should make this process as painless as possible. We preferred services that are flexible enough to use whatever information you can provide and do not reject incomplete information. The most interaction you'll have with a data removal service is giving it your personal information, so the ideal data removal service should make this process as painless as possible. We preferred services that are flexible enough to use whatever information you can provide and do not reject incomplete information. Reasonable price: You can subscribe to a data removal service for as little as $20 a year or as much as $300, with significantly higher pricing for additional features and family accounts. We gave preference to services that met our minimum criteria at an affordable price. Data removal service Cost per year Family discount or plan EasyOptOuts $20 None Incogni $99 $198 per year for four people DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro $100 None Mozilla Monitor $108 None Kanary Copilot $120 50% off family members' accounts DeleteMe $129 $229 per year for two people, $329 per year for four people Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover $100 $233-per-year Multi-device Ultimate bundle for two adults and up to 10 children; also includes antivirus, VPN, and other tools Privacy Bee $197 None Optery $249 (tiered pricing; custom removals available at this tier) 20% discount for two, 25% for three, 30% for four or more accounts Transparency: We gave preference to data removal services that showed what they found and when it was removed. We gave preference to data removal services that showed what they found and when it was removed. Custom removal: Your information can pop up in surprising places, which is why a data removal service should ideally have a system for customers to report sightings of their information online and have the company investigate whether it can be removed. Your information can pop up in surprising places, which is why a data removal service should ideally have a system for customers to report sightings of their information online and have the company investigate whether it can be removed. Number of data brokers covered: With rare exception, most data removal services say they cover at least 100 data brokers. This is a very difficult figure to verify independently and as such we don't consider this to be the most important criterion. If the data removal company can prove that it found your information and removed it, and if it offers custom removals, the actual number of data brokers doesn't matter as much. With rare exception, most data removal services say they cover at least 100 data brokers. This is a very difficult figure to verify independently and as such we don't consider this to be the most important criterion. If the data removal company can prove that it found your information and removed it, and if it offers custom removals, the actual number of data brokers doesn't matter as much. Trustworthy security practices: You need to provide an enormous amount of personal information to a data removal service in order for it to track down and remove your data. The company, in turn, must explain what measures it uses to protect your data, and it should not sell your information for profit. When setting up our accounts, we provided as much information as possible to the data removal service. In most cases, this included names and variations of names, a birthdate, current and previous addresses, and email addresses. A few services requested more information, such as the names of relatives, and some asked for a limited power of attorney and a redacted copy of a driver's license. We evaluated each service not only on its ease of setup but also on how flexible it was. For example: Some services required a full address and would not accept a partial one. That's needlessly restrictive and annoying if you don't remember the precise house number for a place you lived at 15 years ago. Once the data removal services started their work, we evaluated the breadth of information they provided to customers; the best services report where they've found your personal information, as well as what action they've taken. We also looked at what actions companies expected customers to take. Lastly, we read each service's privacy policy and contacted companies as necessary to better understand how they operated and what they did to protect customers. We culled the list of finalists to five: DeleteMe, EasyOptOuts, Incogni, Optery, and Privacy Bee. In March 2025 we recruited Wirecutter staffers to embark on a year-long journey to test each one long-term. Each person is tracking what information their assigned service says it has taken down each month. Our testers are also regularly searching for their information on a set of five data brokers that all of these data removal services claim to cover. We will continue to update this guide with their findings. I Tried, and Failed, to Disappear From the Internet You don't have to pay for a data removal service in order to get data brokers to take down your data. You can start by simply searching for your name and 'address' or 'phone number,' and browsing the results. Sites that claim to have your information should also have an option to request that it be removed; this usually involves filling out forms, responding to emails, and sometimes providing more personal information in order to prove who you are. Most of the data removal services we tested include detailed instructions to remove your data from specific data broker sites. Some, like DeleteMe and Optery, perform a free scan to start you off in finding the companies selling your data. Others, such as Kanary Copilot and Consumer Reports's Permission Slip, help identify data brokers and streamline removal requests, but you still do the bulk of the work. Alternatively, you can skip engaging with data brokers and instead try to have search results that contain your personal information suppressed. Google's Results About You tool generates reports about sites that might have your personal information and allows you to request that such sites be removed from search results. Even after I had most of my data removed from broker websites, Results About You still found and removed several results that listed my information. However, the data brokers still have my data — it's just not as easy to find. DeleteMe for MacOS DeleteMe is easy to set up and even easier to use: For $129 a year, you receive periodic reports on what data it has removed on your behalf, but otherwise it does the work for you. With a successful track record that stretches back more than a decade, DeleteMe may well be the original data removal service. The company offers a comprehensive and hands-off approach to removing your data, and we specifically appreciate the breadth of information that DeleteMe covers and its flexibility regarding how much information you provide. DeleteMe's high-quality experience and thoughtful design make it stand out from the rest, even services that cover more data brokers. Setting up your account is painless and comprehensive. DeleteMe, like other data removal services, requires you to enter your legal name and several variations on it at setup. We really liked that it frequently needed only partial information, such as the city and state, but not street, of previous addresses. That's great, because we couldn't remember every place we've lived over the past two decades. Some data brokers, on the profiles they construct about you, list people they think are related to you, so we liked that DeleteMe was one of the very few data removal services that let us include information on family members in our profile. DeleteMe doesn't remove relatives' information (at least, not without a family plan), but this information might improve its results. DeleteMe does have two requirements that might scare some new users: It asks that you grant it a limited power of attorney and upload a redacted photo of an ID, such as a driver's license. The former allows the company to act on your behalf; it's restricted to data removal activities, and you can revoke it at any time. The latter ensures that you are who you say you are, and DeleteMe includes tools for removing your ID number in its uploader. Five of the nine data removal services we tested asked for a limited power of attorney, but only DeleteMe and Optery asked for a state ID. You never have to interact with it again — if you don't want to. Once you set up DeleteMe, you don't need to do anything else. Within seven days you receive your first report detailing what DeleteMe has done on your behalf. The company then emails you fresh reports quarterly on what it has found or removed, and it occasionally asks permission to add a new data broker to search (you should grant that permission). If you want to log in more frequently, you can view a large, colorful chart that DeleteMe updates with how much information it has removed on your behalf, and you can browse old reports, too. It offers additional tools that can keep your information out of data brokers' hands. You can create masked emails that automatically forward to your primary email address, which you can use to sign up for services and then abandon if they become overwhelmed with spam. You can also create masked phone numbers that forward to your real phone number, which gives you an additional layer of privacy, though they cost $7 per number. The DeleteMe Search Yourself tool lets you run Google searches and then mark the results as something you want to keep, something you want removed, or something that's not related to you. (Privacy Bee has a similar Manage Trust tool, but DeleteMe's is easier to understand.) You can also submit custom removal requests, in a separate form. DeleteMe is reasonably priced, compared with the competition. Across the data removal services we looked at, we found an average annual cost of about $118 — just a few dollars less than DeleteMe's $129-per-year price tag. If you decide to cancel your subscription, DeleteMe will prorate the cost and refund you. DeleteMe also offers a repeatable free scan of data brokers and includes numerous DIY guides that can help you send your own take-down requests. Flaws but not dealbreakers It doesn't show much proof of its work. Optery includes detailed screenshots of the data brokers that are selling your information, and it updates those frequently. In contrast, DeleteMe has a more hands-off approach: It sends you quarterly reports listing the sites and types of information for sale but offers no screenshots to back that up. It doesn't cover as many data brokers as other services do. On its website, DeleteMe lists hundreds of data brokers it searches and sends removal requests to, but if you subtract all the ones that are limited to corporate-account tiers or special requests, the list shrinks to about 100. Optery and Privacy Bee cover 635 and 914 brokers, respectively, but also cost significantly more. However, you can ask DeleteMe to take down other information you come across using the custom removal request option. Does covering more data brokers necessarily give you better results? That's something we'll be looking at in our long-term testing. Set-and-forget means you won't get much feedback. We think most people would prefer a service that demands very little time and attention, but DeleteMe's approach does come at the cost of your knowing what it's up to. Kanary Copilot, Optery, and many other data removal services show a stream of new information about where your data is and what the company is doing about it. With DeleteMe, you have to trust the process. EasyOptOuts EasyOptOuts matches its barebones design with an affordable annual price. It's the cheapest data removal service we've tested, and it gets the job done. EasyOptOuts offers a simple, low-risk way to try a data removal service. It's far cheaper than the other services we tested, and although it doesn't give you as many features, its low price makes it a solid, entry-level option to start removing your data from the internet. It's so cheap. EasyOptOuts costs $20 per year — not per month, per year. That's a fraction of the cost of our top pick. Just about anyone can afford to sign up. It's a set-and-forget experience. Like DeleteMe, EasyOptOuts doesn't give you real-time updates on where it has found your data. Three times a year, it sends you an email listing the data brokers that EasyOptOuts found with your information, as well as the companies that it has asked to remove your data. These reports aren't even available on the EasyOptOuts site, so be sure not to miss any in your inbox. EasyOptOut's website lists 111 data brokers it covers. That's less than most of the other services we tested but a bit more than DeleteMe's core offering. EasyOptOuts also lists 26 additional data brokers that the company claims are downstream from brokers it does cover, and says that your information will likely disappear from them, as well. The company says that you can email requests for the service to look at a specific data broker. DeleteMe's custom removal request system is more robust. EasyOptOuts told us that it uses an entirely automated system for removing customer data. Its FAQ page notes that one major data broker uses 'an opt-out process that [EasyOptOuts] can't support.' We'll be curious to see if this automated approach yields good results in our long-term testing. Flaws but not dealbreakers The low price comes at the cost of features and flexibility. The reports from EasyOptOuts are extremely light reading. They don't even include what information it found (which DeleteMe reports) or screenshots (which Optery provides). Although you can email and request that EasyOptOuts look at a particular data broker, the company told us that its system is entirely automated, so we're skeptical that this could be as effective as the custom removal requests that other companies offer. Entering information isn't as easy as with our top pick. It's tricky to enter your information into EasyOptOuts, because the service places annoying limits on name variations and requires complete addresses. EasyOptOuts told us that it hasn't undergone any third-party audits. That isn't a dealbreaker, but we would like to see the company invest in more ways to prove its trustworthiness to customers. DeleteMe has undergone third-party audits of both its internal security practices and its financials. Share this article with a friend. We found a lot to like about Optery. Its tiered pricing is flexible for tight budgets, and it lets you choose between providing additional information or having it search only a smaller (but still large) pool of data brokers. Optery is also one of the few data removal services that show screenshots of data broker sites as proof that those brokers hold your information. It does come at a cost, however: Although pricing starts at $39 a year, you need to pay $249 to get custom removals. We prefer our top pick. We like the slick look of DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro. We also appreciate that it stores the personal information you provide on your computer, not on DuckDuckGo's servers. At $100 a year, Privacy Pro is reasonably priced, but it's bundled with other services that you may not use, so judging its value was harder for us. Also, you must have the DuckDuckGo browser installed to use it. Still, if you're particularly privacy-conscious, you might want to take a look at this service — but only if you need a bundle. If there's an 800-pound gorilla among data removal services, it's Privacy Bee. For $197 a year, this company searches for your data across a staggering 914 data brokers. However, we found Privacy Bee's interface overwhelming and its system for trusting some companies with your data questionably useful. Its account-setup process leaves a lot to be desired, too. Permission Slip by Consumer Reports is an iPhone-only app that gamifies managing your data with a Tinder-style interface and provides templates for you to easily send removal requests to companies that sell your information. It doesn't search for your data as other services do, so it isn't a data removal service in the same sense as our top pick, but it does walk you through how to send data removal requests to many sites and companies that aren't traditional data brokers, such as Wendy's and Slack. If you pay $60 a year, it will blast out removal requests to a preset list of 100 data brokers and have a human fill out 25 removal requests on your behalf. Our top pick is more comprehensive. Surfshark VPN is behind Incogni, a well-designed service that costs $99 a year, but that price increases to $180 when you add the option for unlimited custom removals. Incogni's most compelling offer is its family plan, which covers five people for $198. We like the detail that Incogni provides about where it has found your data and what it has done, but our top pick is cheaper and easier to use. Kanary Copilot is an unusual service that requires you to download the iPhone app to create an account, but after you've created it, you can access it from any web browser. Like Permission Slip, Kanary Copilot is adept at helping you better control who has your data and provides much of its service for free, but as with that service, we disliked having to take action on our own to get data removed. We like its design and ease of setup, but Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover does only so much automatically — to address everything the service found, we had to follow the included instructions to request the data removal ourselves. If you're keen on privacy or a fan of Firefox, Mozilla Monitor seems like an easy choice, but this service is not what it seems. The data removal services under Mozilla Monitor's hood are provided by OneRep, whose founder has admitted to also founding several data brokers. Mozilla has pledged to find a new vendor, but at this writing OneRep is still powering Mozilla Monitor. This article has been updated to clarify EasyOptOut's compatibility with major data brokers. This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.
New York Times
16 hours ago
- New York Times
Retinol May Thin Your Skin, but That's Why It Works
Retinoids initially thin out the very top layer of the epidermis (called the stratum corneum). NYT Wirecutter Skin is made of several layers: From the outside in, they're the epidermis, the dermis, and the hypodermis or subcutaneous fat. The outermost layer, the epidermis, is itself composed of several stacked components. Sitting on the very outside of that top layer is the stratum corneum — and when we talk about 'thinning out the skin,' this is the layer we're talking about. By the time the cells reach this layer, they've lost their nucleus and are essentially dead, said dermatologist Muneeb Shah. So having a 'thick' stratum corneum isn't always a good thing, as the buildup of dead skin cells can make the skin appear dull. Your skin sheds the dead cells on its own, but using a retinoid (or exfoliant) speeds up the shedding of that dead layer to reveal newer, brighter skin. So yes, a retinoid thins out this topmost layer initially — but that's a good thing. 'This can be beneficial because it can improve skin texture and tone, reduce clogged pores and acne, and allow other ingredients to penetrate more effectively,' said dermatologist Chelsea Hoffman. This thinning is temporary because by about four weeks of consistent retinoid use, the fibroblasts in the dermis are producing more collagen and elastin, ultimately thickening the dermis and skin overall, said dermatologist Fatima Fahs. However, that very top layer of dead skin cells 'remains thinner than it would be without retinoid use,' Fahs said, because skin cells are in a constant state of turnover. So whether the thinning is temporary depends on how you look at it, but the good news is, this thinning is working to reveal brighter, smoother skin, Fahs said. This initial thinning can contribute to 'retinization' — the irritation, skin flaking, breakouts, and redness that crop up for some people when they start to use retinoids. Folks online sometimes refer to it as the 'retinol uglies' or 'purging.' Rest assured that these are normal and temporary side effects for most people (because skin often builds up a tolerance to retinoids after six to eight weeks), and using face moisturizer may help to alleviate some of them. Part of the reaction, such as flaking, can be attributed to those dead skin cells shedding at a quicker rate.
