OptOut Shelf

Aaron Marsden

Behind OptOut Shelf

About

Self-employed digital marketing consultant, Austin, 41. My day job involves helping small businesses think about how they show up in search results. What this site covers is what happens when those same searches surface information about a private person who never hired anyone to manage it.

The office is a converted spare bedroom in a 1990s brick ranch house in South Austin. There's a sit-stand desk, dual 27-inch monitors on a swing arm, and a whiteboard on the door where broker status gets tracked with colored dot markers. A printed broker-reappearance timeline is taped to the wall beside the desk. The Yubikey lives clipped by lanyard to the left monitor bezel when I'm at the desk. My partner has opinions about the Yubikey on the keychain. The timeline has gone uncontested.

Over the past two years I've paid for and tested DeleteMe, Incogni, the full Proton bundle, RoboForm, and EaseUS BitWiper, all on my own name and address in Austin. I've manually submitted opt-out requests to more than 50 individual brokers and tracked every result in a spreadsheet: confirmation dates, re-listing dates, and which services' monthly reports described work that hadn't happened when I verified against a live search. A row turning green at 90 days means a broker has stayed suppressed past the re-check threshold. Those are the wins.

The reviews here are built on that record. My background is digital marketing, not cybersecurity or privacy law. Someone who paid for the services, checked the results, and kept detailed notes.

Posts by Aaron Marsden

Disclosure

Some outbound links here are affiliate links, meaning I get paid a small commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I don't collect or store any data about which links you click. For more on how the editorial side handles affiliate relationships, see my Editorial Policy.