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Surfshark and Optery: What Happened?

On September 8, Surfshark announced it had acquired a majority stake in Optery. Terms were not disclosed. GP Bullhound advised Optery on the sale.

Optery is not shutting down. Surfshark says it will keep operating as a standalone company with its own team, customers, technical architecture, and product. Lawrence Gentilello stays on as CEO. If you are an Optery customer, nothing changes today.

We have written about Optery since 2021. They are our competition and they built something good.

That said, we have seen this movie before.

What Optery was good at

Worth saying plainly, because it explains why this deal happened:

  • Deep US broker coverage. More sites than most, with tiered plans so you paid for the depth you needed.

  • Screenshot receipts. Before and after proof of what was found and what came down. Members love this, and for good reason.

  • A real free tier. DIY exposure reports at no cost, which brought a lot of people into privacy work who would never have paid for it.

The acquisition

This is Surfshark's second acquisition in data removal. The portfolio now looks like this:

  • Incogni, broad consumer coverage

  • Ironwall, built for government employees, public officials, and executive teams

  • HeyPolo, built for family location-sharing

  • Optery, U.S. depth and exposure reporting

Surfshark itself merged with Nord Security in 2022, with both operating autonomously. So one corporate structure now sits above four personal data protection brands that compete with each other on paper.

Surfshark's stated plan is to keep them separate and share expertise across broker coverage and search removals. That is a reasonable plan. It is also the plan every acquirer announces.

The part that matters for you

We wrote Removaly: What Happened? in 2023 when Removaly went dark and nobody would say why. DuckDuckGo eventually confirmed the acquisition and folded the tech into Privacy Pro. Here is what happened to the product after that:

  • Site coverage shrank

  • The roadmap shifted

  • The service became one line item in a bundle

Nobody was acting in bad faith. The incentives just changed. A standalone removal service lives or dies on removal quality. A removal feature inside a subscription bundle lives or dies on subscription retention, and those are not the same job. Mozilla Monitor Plus shut down entirely in December 2025. Removaly, Sparticus, Jumbo, Erazer, all the competitors on our original 2020 business plan, are gone.

So, three things to watch over the next year if you are an Optery customer:

1. The site list. Coverage is the single hardest and most expensive part of this work. Brokers change opt out forms constantly, new sites launch monthly, and automations that worked last quarter break this quarter. It is also the first line item that gets quietly trimmed when a product becomes part of a portfolio. Screenshot your current tier's site list now so you have a baseline.

2. Overlap with Incogni. Two services under one owner, targeting the same US consumer, at different price points. That is a duplication that acquirers usually resolve eventually. Independence today is not a commitment forever.

3. The review ecosystem. Incogni publishes comparison content ranking data removal services, including ours and including Optery's. Those comparisons are now intra-portfolio. Treat "best data removal service" roundups from any brand that owns other brands accordingly, and weight independent testing instead.

The broader point is the same one we made about Radaris and OneRep, from the opposite direction. Who owns your removal service, and how they make money, determines what they will do when the work gets expensive. That is not a knock on Optery's team. It is just the question worth asking before you renew anything.

What Kanary does for you

We are independent. No parent company, no bundle, no VPN to upsell you into. That is a business decision with tradeoffs, and it is the one we keep making.

  • We publish our site list and keep expanding it. Coverage is the product. It does not get trimmed to hit a margin target set by somebody else.

  • We cover more than brokers. Search engines, social media, risky sites, and LLMs including ChatGPT. Broker removal alone stopped being sufficient a while ago.

  • We escalate when opt outs fail. Authorized agent enrollment, address confidentiality program setup, and legal escalations using court orders where members are eligible.

  • We set up decoys when removal is not an option. Rachel covered the reasoning at HOPE 26 in Poisoning the Well: How Decoys and Misdirection Protect Privacy When Opting Out Isn't Enough.

  • We do not sell your data. Ever, to anyone, including a future acquirer.

If you are on Optery and happy, stay on Optery. Just keep a copy of your exposure report and check your site list in six months.

Questions? Reach out at [email protected].

Further reading:

Kanary, Removaly: What Happened?, Mozilla Monitor Plus: What Happened?, DeleteMe v Optery v Kanary

Surfshark, Surfshark acquires Optery