MyLife.com advertises itself as a way to “see & improve your reputation score” and control your private information online. It’s actually a bullshit scam that lets anyone who googles your name leave anonymous Yelp-like ratings of you. You do not want to be on MyLife.com!
I was scheduling a phone interview for one of my customers, and they asked me to add one of their employees to the interview. They didn’t say the dude’s title. I tried searching for him on Linkedin and he wasn’t there. No resumes posted. Not on facebook. So I just googled his ass to see what came up.
The only thing that came up was his listing on MyLife with his name, and the city he lives in, age, family members, etc. That didn’t help me for my purposes but I did think to myself, hmm, I wonder what it says for me. So I put in my name and saw my location, age, family members, etc. I didn’t like this! So I googled “remove mylife” and found this handy-dandy article.
Guess what? There are lots of sites like MyLife that put all your info on google and shit! All of them except MyLife have online opt-out forms that the link will walk you through completing. I’d recommend using a burner email account for them.
MyLife, in addition to not having an online opt-out, makes it look like if you sign up for an account, you can opt out. But you can’t. It’s a scam. They prey on people who google themselves, see these ratings, say, “I don’t want randos on the internet to be able to rate me!” and then click the link to sign up for an account, and possibly a paid membership to “take control” of this information. Except none of that will hide you from showing in the MyLife search results.
Don’t sign up for a MyLife account!
Apparently the 2 ways to remove yourself from MyLife are:
- Email privacy@mylife.com that you want them to remove your listing. They will refuse to do so and say you should sign up for a MyLife Premium membership at some cost to control your information. You then need to email them back and say you don’t want their premium membership and to remove your listing. They in theory are supposed to comply.
- Call 888–704–1900 and ask them to remove your listing. Be prepared to wait on hold! The auto attendant announced to me that I was caller number 32 with an estimated wait time of 29 minutes. I hoped for an auto-callback option but of course there wasn’t. Most people would probably give up right there but I took the time to fill out the opt-out forms for all the other sites on that Medium link while I waited. I did that but I was still caller number 18 so I figured I’d bang out this post. And I did bang out this whole post except for the end result of the phone call because I still was on hold and caller number 13 by the time I finished everything else in the post. I ended up waiting on hold a total of 61 minutes until it was my turn to have my call answered...and the shit hung up on me. At least I was doing other stuff and was using my headset so I just had the damn hold messages about taking control of your online information and parents being reunited with children they gave up for adoption playing on loop in my ear for an hour for no benefit whatsoever.
Stupid MyLife rabbit hole. I suppose I probably should’ve done the email route. I will...at some point! At least all the other ones are scrubbed.