Roni Kobrosly Ph.D.'s Website

I was scrolling through HackerNews the other day when I stumbled onto auto-identity-remove, an open-source project that automates the painfully tedious process of opting out of data brokers and people-search sites. The premise immediately hooked me: instead of paying $40–$100 a year for a service like Incogni or Optery, you run a script that uses Playwright to fill out opt-out forms across 500+ brokers (Spokeo, WhitePages, Acxiom, LexisNexis, etc). It can run on a monthly schedule, with CAPTCHA solving and persistent state tracking so it doesn't resubmit completed removals. Privacy tooling that's transparent, local-first, and free is exactly the kind of thing I want to see more of, and I figured the best way to support it was to actually contribute.

The one catch was that the project was macOS-only. It leaned on AppleScript for iMessage notifications, osascript for Mail.app emails, launchd for scheduling, and open for browser launches. The commit I wrote added full Linux support: swapping in notify-send for desktop notifications, sendmail/mail for email opt-outs, xdg-open for browser handoffs, and generating systemd user timer units instead of launchd plists for the monthly schedule. The setup script now detects your platform and walks you through the right path, and the Playwright browsers cache resolves to the correct location on each OS. If you're a Linux user who cares about scrubbing your data off people-search sites, the project should now work end-to-end for you and if you want to help expand broker coverage or tighten up selectors, the repo is very open to PRs.