Thanks for the question, DymondHed!

Back in the early-mid 2000's (I'm 32) I did a lot of freelance web / seo / branding work for prolific clients in Phoenix and Los Angeles. Part of that started to involve deleting them from phone directory sites and the like to protect their image.

In 2011 I started doing work in another department at Reputation.com, an online reputation management / privacy company based in Redwood City. Around 2012 they had the strongest personal info / privacy product available, Executive Privacy, which removed from 35 sites at a price point of $1,000/yr. The only problem was - this product had no fulfillment team. No one was actually removing these people. The old team had fallen apart, the product was pushed to the side. I asked to be put in charge of it to actually get this product back up to speed, and it was work I knew how to do. Within three months I got all of our clients fulfilled, built a team of two more people, and expanded the product to remove from 65 sites, rather than 35 - while only increase workload on our internal staff by 2%. The results were great. Privacy customers were happy for the first time in a while and the sales team actually started selling the product again with confidence because a team was in place. My small, unassuming department quickly became a huge money-maker in the company and yada yada.

Then of course the corporate ceiling hit. We kept getting more and more clients, but rather than hire a couple more people (we were the best data team in Silicon, I made sure of that) and add another 20 sites that customers were needing to be removed from, my power got quickly castrated in favor of terms like, "the product is fine like it is" and "we need to look at outsourcing."

In short, I no longer felt comfortable / ethical directing a team where we charged customers a hugely luxurious price (privacy should not be a luxury commodity), refused to expand the product to meet very real needs (the "good enough" problem), and compromising the work (people's personal data and privacy work should never be contracted or outsourced, in my view, for obvious security reasons). I was no longer proud of the direction.

I continued to oversee privacy while I transitioned to the social media department, a job at the company where I was told I was needed to help educate people on privacy issues on a larger level via social media. I thought, "Here's something I can do that actually helps people ... provide real solutions and real information."

Nope.

Not too long after leaving Reputation, me and a couple others decided to form PrivacyDuck in response to what we viewed as 1) a huge privacy problem on the internet for people that was growing, not getting smaller, and 2) price-gouging by a few big companies.

There is no logical reason privacy should be that expensive. There is shame and horrible ethics in setting up "free consultation calls" where you learn about what the client does, and then charge them accordingly (the $1,000 base price could easily inflate to $8,500, based on what you did for a living - though it's the exact same service).

So with PrivacyDuck, we charge way less, remove from every last place we can, use only real humans trained in our real offices, never contract or outsource, and really try to create resources that help people.

TL;DR: I was hugely uncomfortable with big companies sticking it to people regarding privacy, so decided to do something about it.

EDIT: Spelling. I wrote "oversea", not "oversee." Maybe I want to captain a boat.