That's just my 2 cents: I would not trust a private corporation to deal with my already poorly handled, if not outright abused, data by other private corporations.
But I'm also not a US citizen, if that makes a difference.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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The best way is unfortunately to do it yourself. This guide and this guide which it references (along with a helpful framework and other helpful websites) were what I found most helpful. It does take a bunch of time though which sucks, I haven't finished it but I'm working on it over time. You can also supplement with this paid site which is only $20 and I remember reading an article that they had the best results of the ones the writer studied. It was still like 60% removal though which is why the manual way is more effective than any site.
That's the sort of info I am looking for. Cheers
As a Swede these services always sound a bit weird. Here anyone can call the tax authority and ask for the equivalent of your social security number (thus it's not used as a secret identifier anywhere). Your home address is also public information, as is the amount of money you declare on your taxes and what cars you own.
We get by just fine. I guess the difference is that it's illegal for companies/employers to misuses that data for advertising and improper background checks - rather than putting it on the persons themselves to "go hide".
... but to your question: I think all those services are scams. If the information got out there once it will again, and the services themselves could very well just lie about the work they do for you. You have no way of actually verifying.
Yes, but these services make a full profile of people, including their political orientation and hot takes, then get GenAI systems to make slop summaries. Then when suit uses a tool to say "give me information about ", it might spit out some shit like "this is a violent anarchist" or whatever, yanno?
There are a bunch of services trying to cover this, Incogni, deleteme as you said, optery, kanary, privacy bee, etc.
Incogni's supposedly fairly good but I haven't used it myself.
None of them are a silver bullet, their theoretical success rate is somewhere around the 60-70% mark. I would recommend you dig into "data poisoning" too. The idea is to flood your online profile with contradictory information, (fake a dresses, wrong age, alternate names) so your profile becomes unreliable and less valuable.
Some services like Data Bee do that to some degree. Nowadays it kinda works but smart systems can filter this data by comparing your online profiles in different places and saying "this age matches in 4 places, this name too" etc, so that's hard
But i'd try some cheap platform, and pair that with manually deleting as much of your data manually from any app, individual accounts etc, even if that takes a bunch of time
What's to stop a broker from reacquiring your information? Sounds like an exhausting process.
The hope is that this is telling them, "stop collecting and delete what you have", but dunno for sure
One of the selling points of delete me in particular is that they will continue to check and every time the data brokers re-acquire your data they will send a deletion request.