How SirVeyor's Privacy Shield Automates Data Broker Opt-Outs

The 30-second version

You give SirVeyor your name and any aliases. Privacy Shield queues automated opt-out submissions to 15+ data brokers in parallel, runs a HaveIBeenPwned breach scan against your email, and gives you back a public-exposure score. Every 90 days, it re-submits the opt-outs because that's when most brokers re-add your records.

The whole user-facing flow takes about 90 seconds. The work it replaces takes 2-4 hours of manual form-filling, and that's only the first round.

Why this exists

(For new readers — last week's blog post covers the data broker landscape in depth: "The 15 Data Brokers That Have Your Home Address (And How to Remove It)." If you haven't read that, the TL;DR is that 15+ major US data brokers are publicly listing your address, phone, income range, and family members right now, the opt-out process is intentionally painful, and they re-add removed records on a 60-120 day cycle.)

The manual treadmill works. It's just exhausting. Most people start it, do half the brokers, get distracted, never re-submit, and end up worse off than if they'd never started — because some of the brokers re-add records more aggressively once they're flagged as deletion-prone.

Privacy Shield is the automated version of the same work. We submit, we track, we re-submit. We tell you what came back. We don't pretend to delete you from the internet — that's marketing-speak we won't use. We submit the requests on the only schedule that actually works (every 90 days), forever.

The flow, in detail

Step 1: You enter your details

• Name (current legal name)
• Aliases (maiden name, common misspellings, "Bob" if you go by Bob but legal name is Robert)
• Current city + state (helps us match correctly when brokers have multiple "John Smiths")
• Email address (for breach scanning)
• Optional: previous addresses, phone numbers

We never store this in plaintext. It's encrypted at rest and only decrypted at submission time. The encryption key is rotated quarterly.

Step 2: We query each broker

For each of the 15 brokers, our worker queue (Bull on Redis) submits a fresh job. The worker hits the broker's site, finds the matching record using the criteria you provided, and submits the broker-specific opt-out form.

Each broker has a different submission process. Some accept email. Some require a form fill. A few want a phone verification code. Two require a copy of a government ID (which we never request — those brokers we mark as "manual required" and surface to you separately).

The form-fill workers run with realistic timing (6-14 second delays between fields, mouse jitter, residential proxies) because the brokers all run anti-bot detection and will silently drop submissions that look automated.

Step 3: We run the breach scan in parallel

Your email goes to the HaveIBeenPwned API. We get back a list of breaches your email has appeared in, with what data was exposed (passwords, addresses, phone numbers, etc.).

We cross-reference the breach data against what brokers list publicly for you. Usually the overlap is near 100% — meaning the data brokers likely sourced (or had their sources sourced from) the same breach data circulating in gray markets.

Step 4: We give you the report

You see a dashboard with:

• 15 broker submissions (✅ submitted, ⚠️ manual required, ❌ failed — with a retry button)
• Breach scan results (count + what was exposed)
• Public-exposure score (0-100, lower is better)
• Next scheduled re-submission date (90 days out)

Step 5: 90 days later, we do it again

Automatically. Forever. As long as you have an active account.

You can opt out of the auto re-submission if you want. Most people don't.

The technical guts (for the curious)

For other founders or devs who care about how this is built, here's the stack.

• Frontend: Next.js 14 + Tailwind. The Privacy Shield UI is one route + a few server components.
• Backend: Express + Prisma + Postgres on Railway. Bull queue with Redis for the worker pool.
• Workers: Playwright running headless on Railway worker containers. Residential proxies via a third-party (we evaluated 4 providers, settled on the one with the cleanest API).
• Anti-bot bypass: Per-broker timing profiles, mouse jitter via Playwright's mouse movement APIs, browser fingerprint randomization (UA, viewport, timezone) for each submission.
• Breach scanning: HIBP commercial API ($3.50/month, well worth it).
• Encryption: Per-user AES-256-GCM key, derived from a master KMS key plus per-user salt. Decrypted only at job-submission time, in-memory, never written to disk.

The hardest part wasn't the queue or the encryption. It was building 15 different per-broker submission flows and keeping them up to date when the brokers change their forms (which happens roughly monthly for the big ones). We've rebuilt the BeenVerified flow three times. The Spokeo flow twice. It's the most maintenance-heavy code in the entire SirVeyor codebase.

What it doesn't do

• It doesn't remove you from court records, voter rolls, or property deeds. Those are the underlying public sources brokers re-scrape from.
• It doesn't remove you from the long tail of small data brokers. We cover the 15 largest. There are 4,000+ in the US.
• It doesn't remove existing inclusion in third-party marketing files that have already been sold to advertisers.
• It doesn't guarantee compliance — some brokers (ZabaSearch, ThatsThem) simply don't visibly remove records for ~30% of requests in our sample data.

We're transparent about all of this. Privacy Shield is the best automated tool we know how to build, and we know its limits.

Why it's free with the waitlist

The marketplace side of SirVeyor — getting paid in SRV tokens when businesses request your data — is the long-term thesis. Privacy Shield is the part that proves we're not just a crypto pitch deck.

We give it away to waitlist users for two reasons. One: it's the gateway drug. Privacy folks join for the opt-outs and stay for the marketplace. Two: it materially helps. Even if you never use the marketplace, having Privacy Shield run for you forever is real, ongoing value.

If we eventually charge for it, current waitlist users will be grandfathered in. That's a public commitment.

How to use it

→ sirveyor.app — join the waitlist. First 1,000 signups get free SRV at launch and immediate Privacy Shield access on invite.

If you're already in: log in, click "Run Privacy Sweep," fill in the form. Ninety seconds later you'll know which brokers had you and what got submitted.

— Jake (founder, SirVeyor)