Five Services That Will Remove Your Personal Information From Data Broker Sites
We live in a post-privacy world . Every time you leave the house, you’re probably being filmed. Every time you turn on the TV, your viewing habits are being recorded . And using the internet in any way is essentially just spraying a stream of your personal information onto data brokers — companies that collect your personal information and sell it to marketing companies, people-searching sites, and anyone else who wants to use it to sell you something.
The phrase “data brokers” might conjure up images of shady companies based in countries with lax privacy laws, but some of the biggest ones are actually well-known companies like Experian, LexisNexis, and Equifax. The data they collect can include your name, address, birthday, phone numbers, income, known associates (like family members), and everything you do on social media platforms. Anyone with this information can use it to bombard you with endless ads, spam emails, and text messages, and if bad actors get their hands on it in a data breach, they can use it maliciously to steal your identity.
If you want to strengthen your online privacy and protect yourself from spam and fraud, one of the most important things you need to do is remove your personal data from the data brokers’ servers. You can opt out manually (a tedious, endless game of whack-a-mole), or you can pay for a service that will do it for you.
You can try to opt out manually.
You can usually opt out of data brokers and other sites that collect your data, but it takes a lot of work. You’ll have to go to each individual data broker’s website and look for their opt-out pages, which are usually buried deep to scare you off. You’ll also need to stop the flow of information to them by changing the settings on your devices, uninstalling unused apps, clearing your browser history and cache, setting it to forget cookies , and using Google’s “ results about you ” tool to remove search results that contain your personal information. You can even start using a virtual private network (VPN) to stay as hidden as possible.
However, you need to remain vigilant and repeat this process regularly, because even after deletion, your information will reappear over time.
The good news is that if you don’t want to make your privacy a full-time job, you can pay for a service to do it for you. While most data removal services won’t be any more effective than manual efforts, they will do the boring work for you, saving you a ton of time.
Best Online Data Deletion Services
There are a number of data removal services that can handle the task of clearing your information from data brokers. Here are five of the most useful:
Opteri
Optery has a free version that makes it a little easier to manually remove your data from broker sites, but the paid version covers a fairly comprehensive list of brokers, is supported by AI, and offers deletion verification. One study found a 68% success rate , which is just a hair below the 70% you can expect if you do it manually . It will continue to automatically delete as long as you pay for the service.
Cost: $3.99 per month or $39 per year.
EasyOptOuts
With the second-best removal rate of 65%, EasyOptOuts is a relatively effective data removal tool that costs a lot less than Optery, which is only slightly more effective. EasyOptOuts doesn’t have a lot of fancy bells and whistles, but it will sift through all the online sites that collect your data and request removal fairly reliably. It will even request removal from sites it can’t scan, just to be safe. Considering how affordable it is, it’s a worthwhile choice.
Price: $19.99/year
IDX
IDX is an effective data removal service that has the most flexible platform in terms of services. It offers three tiers: Identity (basically just monitoring, no removal services), Privacy (probably the best choice if data removal is your priority), and Complete (includes a lot of other tools, like a credit locker).
Price: $8.96/month (Identity), $11.66/month (Privacy), $32.90/month (Complete), family plans also available
Canary
Kanary also offers a free version that’s relatively limited and doesn’t help you manually remove your data — it just tells you where your data was located — but you can use it without a credit card, so you can test the service before deciding whether to pay for it to actually remove your data from those sites. On the downside, its app is only available for Apple devices, with a waiting list for Android phones and tablets. Some reviews note that Kanary’s network is a bit too broad, flagging your social media accounts for cleanup, which is something you probably don’t want it to do.
Cost: $12 per month or $105 per year (family plans also available)
Permission to issue a permit
Permission Slip , launched by Consumer Reports, is a free data removal app. Some people have raised privacy concerns due to its somewhat complex user agreement, but for zero dollars, it can certainly automate much of the work required to remove your personal data from broker sites, so it’s worth considering.
Cost: Free (donations welcome)
Do you need one of these services?
Whether one of these services is worth it for you depends on how much free time you can devote to cleaning up your data trail, and how annoyed you are that faceless corporations know so much about you. You can always start with Permission Slip as a free option to see if it makes a difference, and then evaluate a paid option later. But whether you do it yourself or pay someone to do it, removing your personal data from data brokers is always a good idea, given that data breaches have become an almost daily occurrence.