Privacy & Data

Who owns your privacy tool?

October 12, 2026

9 min read

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Permission Slip belongs to DeleteMe now, and Mine belongs to McAfee. Before you hand a privacy app your inbox, it's worth asking who will own it next year.

If you're here because Permission Slip suddenly says "by DeleteMe" on it, here's the short version. Consumer Reports launched Permission Slip in 2022, announced in May 2026 that it was transferring the app to DeleteMe, and DeleteMe announced the acquisition on July 30, 2026. The free version still exists, a paid Plus tier has been added, and both companies say pending requests carried over without you doing anything.

That sale was the third privacy-app acquisition in eight months. We make a privacy tool too, which makes this a strange article for us to write. Read it the way you'd read a restaurant review written by the place next door, and check every claim, because the point of what follows is that you shouldn't have to take anyone's word for it.

Eight months of privacy-app acquisitions

In November 2025, McAfee bought the consumer app from MineOS, the Israeli startup behind Mine (sold as SayMine), which helped people see which companies held their data and ask them to delete it. Calcalist put the price in the tens of millions of dollars. MineOS kept its enterprise business, and the consumer app was folded into McAfee's own protection platform. McAfee itself agreed to be bought by an investor group led by Advent and Permira in 2021, so the app now sits inside a private-equity-owned security company.

In March 2026, DeleteMe bought Block Party. Tracy Chou founded it in 2018 to protect people from harassment on Twitter, and it had since become a browser extension that locks down privacy settings across social platforms. In the announcement, DeleteMe's CEO called it "the first of several steps we're taking this year."

The next step came in July, when DeleteMe announced it had acquired Permission Slip. Consumer Reports built that app to help people use the privacy rights it had spent years lobbying for, and Permission Slip says more than 5 million privacy requests have gone through it.

None of this is a scandal. Founders sell companies all the time, and Block Party's founder sounds genuinely happy about her new home. The point is narrower than that. Each of these apps asked people for something sensitive, and the people who said yes made that decision about a company that no longer exists in the same form.

Why ownership matters more for privacy tools

Most apps you can judge by whether they work. A privacy tool needs something from you before it can work at all, whether that's access to your inbox or a photo of your ID. Whoever buys the company gets more than the software. Sometimes they get what you handed over, too.

The category already has a track record of what happens when the incentives drift.

Avast sold antivirus software that promised to block online tracking. The FTC found that from 2014 to 2020 its subsidiary Jumpshot sold users' browsing data to more than 100 third parties. In 2024 the FTC ordered Avast to pay $16.5 million and banned it from selling browsing data for advertising.
Onerep was the data removal service Mozilla bundled into Monitor Plus in early 2024. Weeks later, Brian Krebs reported that Onerep's founder had launched dozens of people-search sites since 2010 and still held a stake in one of them, a data broker called Nuwber. Mozilla said it was winding down the partnership that March, though Monitor Plus didn't actually end until December 2025.
Unroll.Me told people it wouldn't touch their personal stuff while its parent company collected receipts from their inboxes. It's owned by NielsenIQ today, and we traced the whole ownership chain in our Unroll.Me alternatives guide.

None of those started as an acquisition story, which is the uncomfortable part. A company's incentives can move without anyone buying it. A sale just moves them all at once, under a privacy policy you never agreed to.

We want to be fair here. DeleteMe has faced nothing like the cases above, and nothing we found suggests Permission Slip users are worse off today. The question isn't whether the new owner is good. It's whether you'd have made the same choice if you'd known who the owner would be.

What changed for Permission Slip users

On paper, very little has changed. Consumer Reports said request processing would continue as normal and the app would stay in the App Store and Google Play. DeleteMe said accounts and pending requests would carry over with no action required.

The visible change is a paid tier. Permission Slip now offers a Plus plan next to the free one, with automatic opt-outs from more than 100 data brokers and concierge requests handled by human agents. That's a reasonable product, and it's also a familiar arc for a free tool once it's owned by a company that sells subscriptions.

The less visible change is who you're trusting. When you signed up, you agreed to terms from a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. The app is now run by a commercial company. It's worth opening the privacy policy you're under today and reading what it says about sharing data and about what happens if the company is sold again.

If you'd rather leave, you can ask DeleteMe to delete your Permission Slip account and the data tied to it. In California and the other states with comprehensive privacy laws, that request carries legal weight.

Looking for a Permission Slip alternative?

The right replacement depends on what you were using Permission Slip for, because it did two fairly different jobs.

If you used it to get off data broker lists, Californians now have a free option that didn't exist when Permission Slip launched. The state's DROP platform sends one deletion request to every registered data broker, and brokers had to start processing those requests in August 2026. Outside California, paid removal services like DeleteMe and Optery do this work, and so does Permission Slip Plus.

If you used it to tell companies you'd actually done business with to delete your account or stop selling your data, that's much closer to what we built. Yorba scans your inbox to find the accounts you've opened over the years, including the ones you forgot, and helps you delete them. For companies that make deletion deliberately hard, our Personal Deletion Agents handle the request for you.

We don't do data broker removal, so if brokers were your main worry, we're the wrong answer. And if the new ownership doesn't bother you, staying put is a perfectly reasonable choice, because the app still works.

How to check who owns a privacy tool

You can do most of this in ten minutes before you connect an account.

Scroll to the footer. The copyright line names the legal entity, and it's often not the brand you know. Unroll.Me's footer, for example, reads "Nielsen Consumer LLC."
Find the privacy policy's section on mergers or business transfers. This is where a company tells you what happens to your data if it's sold, and it's usually short enough to read in a minute.
Look up who funded it. Venture investors expect an exit, and selling the company is a standard way to get one. Mine had raised $42 million from investors including Battery Ventures, Saban Ventures, PayPal and Google's AI fund before its consumer app went to McAfee.
Check the legal structure. A Public Benefit Corporation has a legal duty to weigh its stated public benefit alongside returns to shareholders. That doesn't prevent a sale, but it does change what the board has to consider.
Search the founder's name next to the product's. The Onerep conflict was there for anyone who linked the founder to his other companies, and it took a journalist to do it.

So who owns Yorba?

We'd be hypocrites to skip this part. Yorba is self-funded and has taken no outside investment. We're incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation, and we're built by the team behind Ruca, a creative co-op.

We chose that setup on purpose. Yorba asks for access to your inbox, and we didn't think anyone should hand that over to a company with investors waiting on an exit. Our own press kit says the funding picture may change someday, and we'd rather you hear that from us than find it later in a footer. If it does, hold us to everything in this article.

The bigger point is the one we keep coming back to. Every company that holds your data is a company that can be sold with your data inside it. The most reliable privacy protection isn't picking the right owner. It's having fewer accounts out there to be owned at all.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Permission Slip? DeleteMe owns Permission Slip. It announced the acquisition from Consumer Reports on July 30, 2026, and the app now appears as "Permission Slip by DeleteMe."

Is Permission Slip still free? Yes, a free version is still available. DeleteMe has added a paid Plus tier with automatic data broker opt-outs and concierge requests.

Who owns Mine (SayMine)? McAfee bought the Mine consumer app from MineOS in November 2025 and folded it into its consumer protection platform.

Who owns Block Party? DeleteMe acquired Block Party in March 2026. Both companies said the products would run separately while they worked out integration.

Who owns Unroll.Me? Unroll.Me is owned by NielsenIQ, a consumer data and measurement company.

What happens to my data when a privacy app is acquired? In the Permission Slip deal, accounts and pending requests moved over to DeleteMe automatically. Check the business transfers section of the app's privacy policy, and if you're not comfortable with the new owner, ask them to delete your account and data.