u/Carey__Rowe

i got a scam call last night and the person somehow already knew my full name and old address

at first i thought it was just a random leak, but then i started looking myself up on some people-search sites and honestly it was unsettling

i found old phone numbers, family members, previous apartments, even stuff i don’t remember ever posting publicly

what shocked me most is how many sites just copy the same info from each other

i tried manually opting out from a few, but it quickly felt impossible to keep up

after seeing mentions in another privacy thread, i tried using OneRep

didn’t expect much, but in a couple weeks a lot of the results either disappeared or stopped showing detailed info

still weird to think this industry exists

does anyone else actively try to remove their info, or do most people just ignore it?

had a pretty uncomfortable moment recently during a hiring process

one of the recruiters casually mentioned an address I haven’t lived at in years and asked if a certain phone number connected to me was still active

wasn’t rude or anything, but it caught me completely off guard because I never gave them that information

after that I started checking what actually appears online when you search my name and apparently there are entire people-search sites building profiles from old records, random databases, previous apartments, relatives, etc

the worst part is some of it wasn’t even accurate anymore

a few sites mixed my info with another person who has a similar name which honestly looked terrible from a professional perspective

I spent a weekend trying to remove the profiles manually and realized it was basically endless because the same data kept appearing across dozens of sites

eventually used OneRep mostly because I got tired of chasing every single broker page myself

not perfect obviously, but it cleaned up a lot of those public profiles and made search results look way less invasive

kind of wild that employers, clients, landlords or basically anyone can pull this stuff up so easily now

do people actually monitor this regularly or do most just not know it exists?

Lately I’ve been hitting this weird ceiling with my agency.

We’re not struggling with leads actually the opposite. There’s a steady flow of projects coming in, mostly small to mid-sized builds, and on paper it looks like we should be scaling. But in reality we’re constantly bottlenecked by dev capacity.

At first I thought hiring more people was the obvious move. But every time we tried

onboarding took forever quality was inconsistent communication slowed everything down and suddenly I was managing people instead of actually running the business

Freelancers didn’t fully solve it either. Some are great, but reliability is all over the place. Missed deadlines, context switching, disappearing mid-project you probably know the drill.

Recently I started experimenting with a different approach working with external dev teams instead of individual freelancers. More like plug-and-play capacity when things get overloaded. I tried a couple options, including a smaller team from CodeLibry, and it felt closer to what I actually needed: less micromanagement, more structured delivery.

Still figuring it out though. Not sure if this scales long-term or just shifts the problem somewhere else.

Curious how others are handling this

Are you hiring in-house aggressively? Building a trusted freelancer pool? Partnering with dev studios? Or just saying no to extra projects?

Would be interesting to hear what’s actually working in real life, not just in theory