OneRep Review 2023: What Is It & How Does It Work?

OneRep Review: Pros & Cons

Features

OneRep is a simple service that doesn’t really offer any features other than deleting your personal information from the internet. The removal process is fully automated, and you don’t need to lift a finger, apart from creating your account and providing the necessary personal details. We appreciate the simplicity of its approach, though competitors like DeleteMe offer a more advanced feature set.

OneRep will then contact data brokers, people search sites and keepers of public records to ask them to remove your private information. This will prevent you from turning up in Google search results and other search engines, or at least reduce your presence there. At the end of the month, OneRep will send you a report via email, detailing its successes for that period.

However, the privacy service is only available to U.S. residents. This means that the success of data removal requests could depend on the privacy laws of the state you live in. Some data broker sites could refuse to delete your data unless you’re covered by a privacy law, like California’s CCPA. Our guide to U.S. privacy laws can help you discover if you’re protected or not.

Data Brokers & People Search Sites That OneRep Contacts

OneRep can remove your data from over 195 people search engines, data brokers and public record sites. 

The heavy hitters on the list include:

• Whitepages.com
• Yellowpages.com
• Intelius.com
• Beenverified.com
• Truthfinder.com
• Spokeo.com
• Instantcheckmate.com
• Peoplefinders.com
• Anywho.com
• Zabasearch.com

Benefits of Using OneRep

OneRep and similar services, like Surfshark’s Incogni (read our Incogni review), help to keep your data off the web by removing personal information from the data brokers it deals with. Data brokers purchase anonymized data from services you use every day, like social media, Google and even pizza delivery services.

The data brokers then try to find matches between these anonymized data sets and records that include identifying information to put together a profile. This profile can contain a lot more data than you’d want anyone to know, and it can be scarily accurate.

Worse still is that data brokers can sell these profiles to marketers, government surveillance agencies (including foreign governments) and even hackers.

The consequences of this could be dire. For example, your health insurer might discover that you suffer from a certain medical condition they were unaware of and raise your premiums. You could even suffer discrimination if details like your sexual orientation leak to your employer. Data broker sites can also suffer breaches and leak your personal information.

Online privacy services like OneRep make sure the chances of these things happening is as low as possible.

Pricing

Compared to DeleteMe, OneRep is more competitively priced, though it’s not as affordable as Incogni. Thankfully, unlike its competitors, it offers a five-day free trial. You need to add a payment card to access the trial, so remember to cancel it by contacting support before the trial period is up.

OneRep offers three pricing plans, depending on the level of protection you need. You can choose to pay either monthly or yearly, with the yearly subscriptions coming at a discount.

The Individual plan costs $14.95 per month with a monthly subscription, while the yearly plan costs $8.33 per month ($99.95 per year). You can also get the OneRep Family plan, which covers up to six family members. It costs $27.95 per month, or $15 per month ($179.95 per year) if you pay for a year in advance.

The third plan, called Individual+, is meant to handle “complex cases,” letting you request removal from sites that aren’t listed on OneRep’s website. Due to the custom nature of this plan, it’s very costly, at $229.95 per month. 

An FAQ entry explains that these complex cases include those where further interaction may be necessary. This is disappointing, as many brokers will flat-out refuse to delete your data unless you send a follow up email. We can’t help but feel that it’s a bit outrageous to ask for a price that high for something that alternatives like Incogni offer for free.

User-Friendliness

Although using OneRep is simple enough, the interface could see some improvements. From our experience using similar services, we find OneRep’s homepage lacking in detail. Both Incogni and DeleteMe provide detailed information at a glance, while OneRep throws you directly into a list of profiles, which might leave you confused at first.

The interface is divided into four color-coded tabs. You can click the question mark icon next to the tab’s name tag to see what it displays, but here’s what each of them does in a nutshell.

• Profiles found — This tab shows the data brokers and people search sites that have a profile matching your description.
• Potential sites — This tab lists data brokers where your information might end up in the future, based on your demographic and other information.
• Removal in progress — This tab tracks the removal progress for the sites that OneRep has sent removal requests to.
• Removed — This tab shows records that have been removed from data brokers.

Clicking on a listing will reveal your personal data that the data broker holds, as well as a link to the profile on the data broker site. 

OneRep defaults to the “profiles found” tab when you open its website. Apart from the tabs, there’s also the date of your latest scan, as well as the nearest future scan. There’s also a pop-up box that shows you why your personal information is online. To access it, click “Why my private info is public?”

If you noticed the grammatical error in that last part, that’s just one example of the poor English used throughout the website. It’s odd, given that it’s a U.S.-based service; you’d expect the one clickable element on the website to have been proofread.

How OneRep Works to Remove Personal Information From Data Broker Sites

There are two ways to get started with OneRep. The first involves using the search bar on the OneRep website to get a free scan, then purchasing a plan or starting a free trial. The other is to simply get a free trial or subscribe to a plan outright. Both methods will ask for some personal information, as is expected from such a website. Let’s get started with the first method.

How to Use OneRep With Its Free Scan

1. Open OneRep

   Visit the OneRep website and type your name into the search bar on the homepage.

   

2. Add Location Information

   Tell OneRep which city and state you live in by typing them into the search bar and clicking on the correct option (there can be multiple cities with the same name in different states).

   

3. Start the Scan

   Once you’ve completed the previous step, OneRep will perform an initial scan using the information provided.

   

4. Enter Your Email

   When the scan is complete, type your email address into the bar, then open the OneRep email in your inbox to verify your account.

   

5. Purchase a Plan

   Although you’ll be able to access OneRep, you’ll see a different version of the website with a tab called “removal frozen.” The removal process won’t start until you purchase a plan or start a free trial. You can do this by clicking the red button at the top of the website that says “remove my private info.” OneRep will start sending removal requests the moment you choose your plan.

   

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How to Use OneRep With a Form

The second method is a lot simpler. After you purchase a paid plan or start a free trial, all you need to do is fill out a form with your personal info. The scan starts automatically once you click “save and start scan.”

Profile Settings

Whichever method you use, once you’re all set up, you can add optional information by going into your profile settings. You can add alternative names, such as nicknames, name variations or other aliases you may have used, as well as previous addresses and alternate phone numbers.

Security & Privacy

Compared to other sites like DeleteMe, OneRep asks for very little information. You don’t even need to add your full address, birth date or phone number to start the scanning process if you create your account with the homepage method. Adding more information will result in more accurate results, though.

Thankfully, no matter how much information you decide to give it, OneRep’s privacy policy is very solid and clearly and unambiguously says that it won’t sell your personal data.

There’s a summary at the top of the privacy policy, which is great for transparency. Our privacy experts scanned through OneRep’s entire privacy policy and found no suspicious clauses, like we did with DeleteMe.

Unlike Incogni and DeleteMe, OneRep doesn’t require any kind of authorization to start scanning. Incogni asks for your digital signature on an authorization form, while DeleteMe goes the nuclear route by asking for limited power of attorney. This could give them more leverage to force services to remove your data, though not everyone may be comfortable giving power of attorney.

Customer Support

OneRep’s customer support consists of a knowledgebase, email ticketing system and phone support. The knowledgebase is pretty comprehensive and well-written — a surprise considering how simple the service is to use. Phone support is obviously the easiest to use, though it’s not available outside of business hours.

Email support is relatively quick to respond. We got a response to our cancellation request within three hours of submitting the ticket. That kind of speed is great for things like trial cancellations, though it isn’t very conducive to longer conversations where you need to ask follow-up questions.

Final Thoughts: OneRep

OneRep is a decent privacy service, even when compared to the alternatives. It might be a bit too simplistic in its approach, and its customer support could stand to improve, but we like the hands-off approach it takes. That said, we don’t like that it doesn’t follow up on requests unless you pay an extortionate sum of money.

What are your thoughts on OneRep? Are you concerned about data brokers holding your data? Have you ever used a data deletion service? Leave us your thoughts in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.

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