Quick note on two things in progress. Both are named Guardian, which was either efficient or lazy depending on how you look at it.
Privacy Guardian
You point it at yourself and it goes looking.
The idea is simple: most people have no real sense of what is already out there under their name. Broker listings, old accounts, forum posts from 2011, addresses attached to public records, profiles that got scraped and resold somewhere along the way. It is all findable. It is just scattered, and nobody has the patience to go find it by hand.
So the tool does the going. You direct it at what you want checked, and it pulls back what it can actually find.
The part that gets people is usually not any single result. It is the total.
Guardian Bot
Same job, except it does not stop after one pass.
Running a check once tells you what was exposed on a Tuesday. Exposure is not static: new listings appear, old data gets resold, breaches surface months after the fact. Guardian Bot keeps looking and tells you when something changes.
Why bother
We wrote a whole thing about the absence of a federal privacy standard and what that costs ordinary people. This is the practical follow-on. While the law is not coming to help, the least you can do is know what is out there.
Same techniques the brokers use. Pointed the other direction.
Both are still being built. We will say so when there is something to try.