Do paid data-removal services pay off?

A lot of personal data — stuff like your home address, phone number, marital status and more — is out there on the internet. Anyone can buy it from sites like Whitepages, PeopleFinders or Intelius, which aggregate data from public records and social media.

You can contact each of these “people search” sites and request they take down your information. Then you might find yourself double-checking that they actually do it, then triple-checking that your identifiers aren’t popping up again.

So it’s a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. Naturally, a whole industry of data-removal services has sprung up. For a price, they promise to do the dirty work for you. But do they deliver?

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Yael Grauer, a researcher at Consumer Reports, who looked into the efficacy of the data-removal industry for the publication.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Yael Grauer: So, these companies sell opt-out services, and they say they’ll find information on these sites and get them removed on your behalf. They might be more effective if you give them more information. Some of them want a copy of your ID, places you lived in the past and that kind of thing, and then they will go through and try to remove that information for you.  

Meghan McCarty Carino: And you looked into the efficacy of these services. What did you find?

Grauer: Overall, the people-search removal industry, at least based on the data that we looked at, was not that effective. We still found people’s information on a lot of the sites we had paid to have them removed from weeks and even months later.

McCarty Carino: And how did you, how did you test this?

Grauer: We got 32 volunteers from our Community Reports project, and we worked with digital safety company Tall Poppy, and we looked at 13 of the most invasive people-search sites. And then we signed up the volunteers for a data-removal service, and then we checked to see if their data was still on those sites a week later, a month later and four months later. And we also had a control group of sorts, where we manually opted people out. That’s a really time-consuming and frustrating process, but they did get slightly more data removed and was taken down more quickly. Some of those services did a lot better than others. We found two in particular that were more effective, which were EasyOptOuts and Optery. But I will point out there are some limitations to our evaluation because we didn’t give these services every bit of information they asked for. But yeah, most of the services did not do as well as we had hoped.

McCarty Carino: And we should note, these services are not cheap, right? How much do they cost?

Grauer: Oh yeah, some of them are really expensive. Some of them are hundreds of dollars a year, but the least expensive one we looked at, EasyOptOuts, was only $19.95 a year and they actually did among the best of the services that we looked at.

McCarty Carino: So why do you think these services don’t work, at least as well as advertised? Why is there so much variation?  

Grauer: That is a really good question. I think some of these sites make it hard to remove your data. Like, I think if a service is trying to automate that removal, they might rate-limit you or have things in place that make it more difficult to remove your information. There’s a lot of reasons that it doesn’t work, and it’s a frustrating process.  

McCarty Carino: Every time we do stories on data privacy issues, it just feels like there’s no good solution. Definitely at the individual level, it’s like, OK, there’s this problem, now there seems to be a solution in these services, but it doesn’t quite work out. What is a solution here?

Grauer: Yeah, that’s a really tough question. On the individual level, I think if people do want to pay for a service, they should just realize that it might not opt you out of everything, and you have to be a little bit proactive to make sure what is still out there. So, a lot of people will manually remove themselves and also sign up for a service. Or you can even reach out to the service to tell them, “Hey, my info is still up on these sites,” and maybe they’ll redo it. But I think this really underscores the need for federal data privacy legislation. I actually find it kind of depressing because the [Federal Trade Commission] did a report on data broker sites in 2014, and they recommended a single opt-out where people can opt out of sharing their information everywhere with a click. And I know that California has a provision for that in the Delete Act, which is coming online in California in 2026. But right now, nationally you can’t do that in most states. And ideally, we wouldn’t need any of these data-removal services and they wouldn’t need to exist because you would have a single opt-out mechanism.

But the other issue, we support a data-minimization mandate that prohibits sharing information with data brokers by default. So, under that, companies couldn’t collect information unless it’s necessary to provide a service. And I feel like the less information that’s collected, the less likely it is to be sold or shared or even compromised due to data breach. And then the final kind of loophole is that there’s a lot of public data exemptions and state privacy laws that we look at, and I think it’s worth thinking through whether there should be constraints on data that’s made publicly available. Maybe it shouldn’t be publicly available. Maybe we should make it easier for people to restrict availability of their address or real estate information and make it harder for companies to share and sell that data. So that might include revisiting what kind of information is routinely stored as public record, knowing that it can get copied in bulk and used in ways that could hurt people.

More on this

Consumer Reports did get some responses from the data-removal services they studied. One called ReputationDefender said its service, which costs upward of $1,000 per year, is more comprehensive than the cheaper $100 per year service that was also evaluated.

Another service called Confidently told Consumer Reports it was planning to update (and presumably improve) its retail service in the near future.

Now there are next-level methods for protecting personal privacy online. We profiled some of them this year in a discussion about the “extreme privacy” community.

These are people who won’t use services from Big Tech. They favor Linux operating systems and use end-to-end encrypted email. Some even register as South Dakota nomads to avoid being tied to a mailing address.

Hal Triedman, who wrote about this community, says it all raises a question: Are these people over the top or are the rest of us just sticking our heads in the sand?

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