Last summer I purchased a home for the first time. A few years prior, I had started browsing around at houses and learned the hard way that by signing up for a bunch of real estate sites and apps to view listings I was giving away a lot of personal information. Signing up using my name, phone number and email address was opening me up to a whole host of people and realtors who automatically had my private details and a list of other personal information as well.
When it came time to search for a home this time around, I did things differently and used MySudo. MySudo is the world’s only all-in-one privacy solution because it allows you to quickly create and customize up to nine profiles called Sudos, each of which has its own phone number, email address, private browser and more, so you can easily keep your private information private. You use the Sudo profile phone number and email address instead of your own and take back control of the information you share with others.
If you’ve ever looked at the nitty gritty of a company’s privacy policy you might be surprised that some of them say something like this:
“We obtain personal information about you from a variety of sources. This includes personal information you provide to us directly, information we obtain from other sources, and information we gather through automated means.”
Looking further at these privacy policies, they say they can access details like your:
- demographic data (such as gender, age range, educational level, household income range, number of children in household, ethnicity to the extent permitted)
- purchasing data, including information about advertisements you have seen or acted upon and information about your interaction with advertisers’ products and services
- occupational data (such as profession, position, title, industry, and business address).
They even might say “If you log in with a third-party account with the Services (e.g. Google), we may obtain information about you, such as your user ID and/or username and other information you have permitted those services to share with us consistent with your privacy settings for that third-party account.”
This might not surprise some of you because there’s a worsening data privacy crisis going on in the world right now, and that’s exactly what privacy-first products like MySudo aim to address, but most people would be shocked to see the extent of information these realtor sites can collect. I definitely did not want another reason to give out any of my personal information, especially for something like a house that I was only browsing for, so I created a specific Sudo under my MySudo plan especially for House Hunting.
Once I had my House Hunting Sudo set up, I could privately browse and sign up for real estate sites and apps using the dedicated working phone number and email address I had selected for my House Hunting Sudo. Finally, I was getting access to listings and services without selling my personal information in the process.
As soon as I got closer in the home buying process and the current owner had accepted our offer on the home we wanted to buy, I chose to continue using a Sudo to keep the process of purchasing the home rolling. I didn’t want to go in and unsubscribe to everything I had signed up for because some of those services would continue to be valuable to me. So, I created another new Sudo (this one I called “New House”) and I gave my realtor and the broker the new Sudo phone number, then I did my favorite part of using MySudo app and pressed the “Delete this Sudo” button*. I let all the information that tied me to the real estate sites break away and I was free to move on without the spam and scams that can come when people can reach out to us.
* Deleting a phone number or its Sudo does not refund your entitlement for that phone number. For example, SudoMax plan provides nine phone numbers total lifetime in the account, as opposed to always allowing up to nine phone numbers concurrently. Once used, the only way to get another phone number is to purchase a line reset.
