IE like Crypto AG:
In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.
All of the “delete my information from data brokers” services IMO, especially the ones that advertise on YouTube. Always smelled fishy to me.
Either that or they’re just more data brokers trying to get exclusivity.
Reject Convenience did a pretty thorough rundown on what they’re doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA
It’s been a minute since I watched, but my key takeaways were that they just reach out to one type of broker which barely scratches the surface of the Data Economy iceberg, and since there’s no legal precedent outside of California and the EU, it’s purely up to the brokers to decide whether or not they want to comply.
So I think it’s probably more likely they really are just private companies preying on people’s anxieties about privacy and relative ignorance about the topic, rather than some kind of governmental conspiracy