When social media started taking root 10 years ago, Rob Shavell and his co-founders were some of the few people thinking about its impact on privacy. In anticipation of what would happen with the data sharing spree, Shavell and his co-founders, Andrew Sudbury and Eugene Kuznetsov, all MIT engineers, founded DeleteMe, a company dedicated to protecting user data.
The data protection company is collaborating with the International Women’s Media Foundation to provide its services to help female and nonbinary journalists protect themselves against online attacks and cyberbullying through doxxing. The collaboration was announced last week.
“Journalists are in the highest risk category, particularly in these volatile times around elections and everything else,” said Shavell.
A survey of U.S. journalists done by the International Women’s Media Foundation found that 37.7% of respondents reported being threatened with or experiencing physical violence while working as a journalist. Additionally, 30.66% of respondents reported being threatened with or experiencing digital violence while working as a journalist.
The collaboration is supported by Microsoft Democracy Forward, which will provide free DeleteMe memberships to women and nonbinary journalists, normally priced at $209.04 for two years.
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The Somerville-based company has spent the past ten years working to ensure that people can clear their data from data brokers and databases. The sign-up process takes less than four minutes, during which customers input the information DeleteMe needs to complete its service.
After members of the International Women’s Media Foundation sign up for their free account, DeleteMe employees, privacy experts, and advisors provide their “first report, " which is a list of all the individual data pieces and locations gathered.
The time it takes to delete data varies from case to case, but DeleteMe estimates that it saves its consumers hundreds of hours a year in self-data searches.
Before the pandemic, the DeleteMe team would find about 250 to 260 pieces of personally identifiable information per customer. Since the pandemic, that number has ballooned to nearly 1,000, according to Shavell.
Recent advances in data protection legislation have made certain aspects of the process easier.
However, according to Shavell, data brokers and data collection companies have become more reluctant to comply, making it harder for consumers and services to comply with privacy requests.
“We have long been protecting journalists across many different organizations,” said Shavell. “They've come to us as one of probably our earliest cohorts of customers because they're in the public eye, and they get faced with a lot of threats, a lot of people that go do research and can take their online persona and connect it to their offline life.”
