Yorba makes a significant collection of features available at no charge. Paying $8 per month or $72 per year gives you added and enhanced features. For example, a free account manages your accounts and mailing lists, while a paid account locates fee-based subscriptions and helps you cancel them. A free account runs a scan for data breaches, while a paid account also monitors for new breaches. And with a free account, you can only take five privacy-enhancing actions per month. I’ll discuss the differences in detail below.
As noted, Yorba doesn’t clear your data from people-search sites. Rather, it aims to dry up the sources those sites draw from. Privacy Bee seeks out your personal information on more than 400 data brokers and, like Yorba, helps you identify and manage all kinds of accounts. With a full $197 yearly subscription, Privacy Bee automates removing your data from brokers and aggregators; that’s not something Yorba does at present.
Services that automate data-broker opt-out generally cost more than Yorba. SurfShark Incogni isn’t too much more at $77.88 per year. But Kanary goes for $179.88, and Optery costs $249.99 each year.
With Abine DeleteMe, Kanary, Optery, and Privacy Bee, you can ease the hit to your wallet by choosing a discounted family membership. Optery discounts additional subscriptions within your family by 20% to 30%, depending on the number. Each added family member costs $89.88 per year with Kanary. With DeleteMe, $129 gets an individual subscription, $229 covers a couple, and $329 expands protection to a family of four. Yorba doesn’t offer family pricing at present.
Getting Started With Yorba
You can do quite a bit with Yorba at no cost. Just create an account with your email and a password. Yorba will send you a verification link via email; click that, and you’ll be in.
A brief tutorial explains that Yorba tracks and manages your accounts. An account means “any company, website, organization, etc. with whom you have an online relationship." Basically, it’s “anything you log in to, pay a fee for, and/or get sent emails from.”
The next step is finding accounts that send you email. There’s also an option to find accounts that you pay fees for, but that's reserved for paying Premium members. More on that later.
A Deep Dive Into Your Email
To start gaining insight into your accounts, you give Yorba all the email addresses you use. Yorba explains that this is the main method of “mapping your digital footprint.” For maximum effectiveness, add every email address that you may have used to sign up for anything online.
I listed my personal Gmail, personal Yahoo mail, and two work email addresses. At the next stage, Yorba flagged the Yahoo address as not eligible for an inbox scan. For the other three, it offered two choices: Sign in with Google or Don’t Connect. My work emails use Google’s G Suite, but they require SSO-based authentication, not the simple online login that Yorba requires. That being the case, I told Yorba not to connect for those two.
I proceeded to the point of logging into my personal Gmail, but then had second thoughts. Do I really want to log in with my password and give this app full access to my inbox? What if an outside entity hacks Yorba? My Yorba contact allayed my fears. The connection uses OAuth, meaning it authorizes Yorba’s access without exposing the password. And the token thus created is only valid for one hour.
Right away, Yorba starts analyzing the accounts whose inboxes you’ve connected. For other accounts, it sends emails to verify your ownership of the account. Once you’ve responded to any verification requests, go do something else. According to Yorba, the initial scan can take up to 24 hours. In testing, it took less than 24 minutes.
Review Found Accounts
Yorba scanned two years of messages from my personal email and found well over 200 accounts. It also scanned the last two months for mailing lists, coming up with more than 60 of those. Separately, it found some data breaches related to the accounts I submitted.
You have two choices at this point. You can add all the found accounts to your dashboard and review them later, discarding any duplicates or errors. Or you can scan the list and import only selected items. I found the latter process extremely awkward. The list of items is a scrolling region without a scroll bar, inside a larger scrolling region holding all your accounts.
This scrolling list within a larger scrolling area style carries over to other pages in Yorba, but the list of items for review is especially awkward. The list is unsorted, and there’s no search function. I did see a box labeled Search by Account at the top, but it didn’t find anything when I tried. The built-in Ctrl-F search only searches the half-dozen accounts that are visible. I gave up and imported them all.
The similar collection of Mailing Lists for review at least came in alphabetic order. I imported all those as well. The process of adding all those items, more than 300 in total, took more than 10 minutes.
Import From Your Password Manager
When you log in to a website, it’s nice to have your password manager fill in the credentials. But do you ever look at the list of all your accounts? It probably includes some that haven’t been used in years. Yorba can import from any password manager that supports export to CSV format and then help you eliminate pointless accounts.
No, this doesn’t mean you give Yorba full access to all your login credentials. All it imports is the account name, associated email address, and URL. To proceed, use your password manager’s export function to create a CSV file of data. Delete all columns except Name, Email, and URL, and put those three in the stated order. Note that Yorba won’t import entries where the username is not an email address.
For testing purposes, I exported my Keeper passwords and massaged the resulting CSV file as described. A list of 400 accounts seemed daunting, so I trimmed it down to 40 by taking every tenth item. The process went smoothly, and it imported all but one of the items. The only hitch is it didn’t tell me which item gave it a problem.
Accounts Collected—Now What?
Once you’ve completed the initial steps of gathering accounts and mailing lists, you can view your progress on the app’s Home page. At this point, Yorba displayed more than 60 mailing lists and over 300 accounts.
A separate dashboard breaks down those accounts into categories such as Finance, News, Travel, and Shopping. This page includes a variety of other statistics, along with a history of recent activities within Yorba.
Stats are fine, but more important is the Accounts page, which lists all the accounts Yorba found and allows you to sort by name, category, or privacy grade. You can also sort by relationship, meaning you can separate accounts with logins, mailing lists, and accounts to which you pay fees. There’s also an option to filter the list. For example, you could view only fee-based accounts with a privacy grade of F.
Another page lists all the data breaches that exposed one of your emails. Like many other services, Yorba gleans this information from the HaveIBeenPwned website. Each listing includes the breach name, privacy grade (if available), email affected, and a detailed description.
You can click a link to go change your compromised password. When you’ve taken care of the breach, click Mark as Resolved to clear it from the list. You’ll find this kind of simple breach reporting in many password managers and antivirus utilities.
Yorba’s Privacy Grade System
When you’re deciding which accounts to terminate, you might want to start with the ones that put your privacy at risk. As part of the service, Yorba checks the privacy policies of major sites against open-source legal analysis data and assigns each a grade from A to F.
This feature would be more useful with more coverage. Only 15% of my accounts displayed a privacy grade, most of them at the D or F level.
Digging Into Yorba’s Account List
When I sorted the list of accounts, I found 5% with a privacy grade of D, another 5% at the F level, and 85% without a grade. The account list doesn’t have a column for difficulty of removal, which I wanted. To check that, you must click each account to bring up a detail box and then click the Delete Account tab.
To get a feel for the difficulty levels, I manually checked all the accounts possessing a privacy grade. Then I checked a roughly equal number of non-graded accounts, simply choosing every fifth or sixth item until I reached a total of 80.
Most of the graded accounts were marked Easy, and only a handful stated the difficulty was Unknown, meaning that Yorba has no deletion advice. By contrast, 68% of the non-graded accounts came up as Unknown. All the graded items had working links, while links for a third of the non-graded accounts proved invalid. Indeed, quite a few of them were odd variations such as info15.citi.com and mail6.creditkarma.com.
My contact at Yorba reports that the company has checked more than 10,000 sites for account deletion details. That includes over 3,000 in the Unknown category—I’m not sure how those listed as Unknown differ from accounts that have never been checked. You can view the growing list at Yorba’s Delete Desk website.
Taking Action With Yorba
After reviewing the available information, I dug into my action options. Right on the home page, Yorba flagged five mailing lists that I rarely open, each with buttons to unsubscribe or mark it as a keeper. When I clicked to unsubscribe, I quickly got a message that the action succeeded. I clicked Keep for another of the lists, which caused Yorba to exclude it from the action list for a month.
In the bottom-left corner I spotted a progress bar with the label “3/5 Actions left” and a note stating that I used two of my five “free monthly actions.” Bummer! With over 60 mailing lists, I’d need more than a year to deal with them all.
Next, I started going through the list of accounts, looking for ones I don’t need. I spent over an hour and checked more than 60 accounts, with very little to show for it. Yorba reported Unknown status for all but five of the accounts, meaning it couldn’t help me. Of the remaining five, Yorba bombed out on four:
- One did not link to an unsubscribe page
- One required me to log in, but I didn’t know the credentials
- One linked to a non-existent page
- One offered the unsubscribe option only to CA residents
That means I succeeded with exactly one unwanted account. The link from Yorba correctly pointed to a page designed for closing your account, and I did so.
After each attempt, I got a debriefing from Yorba. Was the account deleted successfully? If not, why not? When I completed the feedback form for the successful deletion, Yorba deducted one more from my five available monthly actions. I’m not telling anybody to cheat, but it seems to me that you could just lie about your successes and then manually remove the deleted accounts from Yorba.
Should You Go Premium?
My experience with the free Yorba was disappointing. It found dozens of mailing lists with an option to unsubscribe or mark as a keeper, but selecting either choice uses up one of five actions available each month, so there’s no way to do a big purge. As for deleting unwanted accounts, I checked five dozen accounts from the list and found exactly one that Yorba could help me delete. And that deletion also counted against my five monthly actions.
Upgrading to a Premium account removes that annoying monthly limit, thankfully. The other big feature that comes with a paid account is the ability to link your payment methods and have Yorba comb those records for ongoing subscriptions. Yes, that means you’re giving Yorba another window into your private life, but it’s no different from engaging an identity theft protection service to monitor your accounts for anomalous transactions. Indeed, Yorba relies on Plaid, a trusted third-party service used by many banks and identity protection services.
To connect with your payment accounts, you log in to each through Plaid. Once Yorba has access to the account list, it asks you to label each as Personal, Work, School, or Other. Keep doing this until you’ve added all the accounts that might be paying for your ongoing subscriptions.
Your found subscriptions don’t appear in the Account list immediately. As with accounts found in your email, Yorba asks you to review its findings first. And as with accounts in email, it’s much easier to add all the accounts and then review them in the full, searchable, sortable Accounts list.
Mostly the list of found fees didn’t surprise me, but it did point to one that had gone up in price without my realizing, and another that I didn’t recognize at all. I quickly clicked the Delete account button for the unknown one, only to be confronted with the dreaded “Instructions not found” and “Difficulty: Unknown” messages. A little digging revealed that the account was familiar and somehow got listed with an unfamiliar name.
Next, I tried the price-hiked account, reportedly with a difficulty rating of opting out as Hard. Per the instructions, I logged into the account before clicking the link. And voilà! It took me to the correct page to delete the account (or downgrade to free, which is what I wanted). In line with Yorba’s estimation, the process was hard, but I accomplished it.
As noted, with a free account, you can only take five actions through Yorba each month, where “actions” means unsubscribing from a mailing list, marking a mailing list as a keeper, or deleting an account. Going for Premium removes that limit. In addition to scanning for subscriptions, your paid account monitors subscriptions on an ongoing basis. Where Yorba gives free users a static scan for breached accounts, paying customers get real-time breach monitoring. But that’s about it for Premium features.
Upgrading to Yorba's paid edition lets you find and manage fee-based subscriptions and also lifts the limit of the monthly actions. But even as a free user, you can get around the actions limit by treating Yorba’s reports as to-do lists for manual actions. Instead of clicking Unsubscribe for a mailing list, go find an email from that list and unsubscribe directly. Then click the minus sign to remove the account from Yorba.
In the same way, if you see an account you don’t need, go directly to the site and cancel it. Yes, Yorba nominally helps by giving you instructions and a link for deleting the account. However, in my experience, most accounts either lack instructions, point to a link that doesn’t work, or both. As with the mailing lists, once you’ve managed your DIY deletion, just remove the item from Yorba’s list.
The one thing you do get with Yorba Premium is the discovery of fee-based subscriptions from your credit card records. Consider springing $8 for a one-month subscription and doing all your subscription management during that month. You can also use that month of Premium access to take advantage of Yorba’s mailing list unsubscribe feature.
Verdict: Stick With the Free Edition for Now
Yorba searches out your accounts and mailing lists at no cost, helping you identify ones that potentially expose your private data for no reason. It aims to help with removals, but in many cases, its information comes up short. The company continues to enhance its database of accounts and even plans to add automated deletion of unwanted accounts. For now, stick with the free edition. And if you really want to stop data brokers and people-search sites from profiling you, try Editors’ Choice apps Optery or Privacy Bee. Both let you sample their abilities for free, and both supply free instructions for DIY cleanup of your data. With their paid editions, you can rely on automated removal of your personal data profiles.