There’s a lot you can do to limit the information that’s available about you online. You can lock down your social media accounts so the public can’t see your private information. You can use masked email accounts, phone numbers, and credit cards to avoid giving away your personal details when you shop. But after you’ve done everything possible, there’s still a lot about you that’s a matter of public record. Aggregating this data and selling you to anyone who’s interested is big business. If this lack of privacy worries you, you may be ready for Abine DeleteMe.
I mentioned masked email, phone, and credit cards as one protection for your privacy. Abine Blur Premium, from the same company, offers those, among other features. You can shop and buy online without ever giving your real email or credit card. DeleteMe protects a completely different side of your private life. Its human operators actively opt you out from the most active and egregious personal data aggregators, and then keep watch for any that pick up your data again.
How Much Does DeleteMe Cost?
A DeleteMe subscription costs $129 per year, which comes to nearly $11 per month. IDX Privacy, which includes a similar feature called Forget Me, runs $79.95 per year and includes a wide variety of other privacy-protecting features. However, IDX Privacy sticks to handling broker sites that support a fully automated opt-out process. DeleteMe, by contrast, employs human agents to handle significant sites where automation won’t cut it. My DeleteMe contact pointed out that some of the biggest brokers require human intervention, and that even if a service clears those that respond to automation, those brokers can pick you up again from the ones that don’t.
You can reduce what you pay per person by adding family members to your DeleteMe account. Paying two years at a time also gets you a break. One person for two years costs $209 total, a $49 savings.
There’s nothing DeleteMe’s experts do that you couldn’t do yourself, of course. If you have more time than money, you can protect your own privacy by studying and following the company’s extensive DIY Opt-Out Guide. This page includes detailed instructions for requesting removal from just about every data broker website. Many privacy-conscious people, however, will prefer to pay the company, if they can afford it.
The company also offers a business-focused version of DeleteMe. An enterprise or small business can sign up to protect its whole staff, or its most public-facing employees. From the individual’s point of view, the experience is hardly different from the consumer-side service. But the business gets a whole management and tracking system. Spear phishing attacks try to create convincing fake emails using personal details of their targeted employees. Prominent reporters and other media personnel risk doxing, or even having protestors appear at their homes. For these and other reasons, DeleteMe’s business edition is growing in popularity.
Data-Broker Basics
Data broker sites don’t steal your personal info. Rather, they gather public information that any persistent researcher could find, package it nicely, and put it on the market.
Some brokers like Spokeo and ZabaSearch have been around for ages, but new ones pop up all the time. Anybody can use them. You give them a name and, if possible, a state or other info to narrow the search. They return just enough data for you to confirm the match, perhaps an address, or a partial phone number. When you click for full details after confirmation, you typically must pay a fee.
Someone who’s looking for you doesn’t have to pick just one broker site. Google someone’s name adding “address” and you’re likely to get hits from the aggregators, like “[name] found in 16 states.” So, anybody who wants to know where you live, whether it’s to send you a fruit basket or to organize an exorcism on your front lawn, can likely find you on the internet through one or more brokers. Worried at all?
Note that DeleteMe can’t actively remove you from search results. However, once its automated systems and human operators remove your data from the brokers, those sites won’t show up in search. Anecdotally, I noticed a dramatic decrease in search hits on my name after I started using DeleteMe, other than those related to my writing for PCMag.
Getting Started With DeleteMe
When you sign up with DeleteMe, the first thing you must do, ironically, is give the service a bunch of personal information. It really is necessary, as DeleteMe can’t opt out for you without proof that it’s working on your behalf. The DeleteMe privacy policy, makes it clear that the company’s philosophy strongly backs privacy rights, and that it aims to protect your privacy, period. As part of that protection, the policy includes a warrant canary, a statement that the company has not received a secret FISA warrant from the government demanding information. Revealing the receipt of such a warrant is forbidden by law, but the law doesn’t cover deleting such a statement when a hush-hush warrant does show up.
You enter your full name, with an option to add alternative spellings or other names you use. Date of birth, gender, email, and primary phone come next. You can also add alternate phone numbers, or numbers you’ve used in the past. Those old phone directory entries never die! Next comes your current address, and any past addresses you care to add.
Finally, and this may seem a little odd, you submit a scan of a government-issued ID with your photo and license number blacked out. The site explains that some sites require an ID to authorize removal of your personal data, but the redacted version is sufficient for this authentication. You can also improve the identification process by listing relatives and employers, and by choosing political affiliation and ethnicity. These last items are wholly optional.
At any time, you can check the DeleteMe dashboard online for an overview of your privacy. A summary near the top reports the number of data brokers being tracked, the number of records reviewed to see if they’re you, and the number of brokers who’ve collected your info. These values change as brokers add or re-add your data and as DeleteMe opts you out.
Charts below let you get a feel for what DeleteMe has done over time. You can see the number of records reviewed each quarter, for example, and the number of records removed. A pie chart breaks down just what types of personal data were exposed.
Despite all that DeleteMe does, it’s possible you might find a broker site that’s not covered. Never fear, there’s a built-in mechanism to bring such a site to the attention of DeleteMe’s removals team. Just find the Privacy Advisor panel at the bottom left of the dashboard and click to make a request. The team will investigate and take appropriate action, which might well mean adding the site to DeleteMe’s list.
You’re also likely to receive the occasional email from DeleteMe noting that it added a new broker and asking for your confirmation to opt out of that broker’s data collection. My company contact noted that the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 requires this notification, and that even if it didn’t, checking with the user is just a good idea. That same act puts more legal force behind DeleteMe’s removal requests, so it’s a good thing overall.
Reports and More Reports
Not long after you sign up, you get an initial report. When I first signed up several years ago, this report showed that all but one of the tracked brokers did indeed have my information, and that an opt-out request had been sent.
For some sites, opting out is an automated process. DeleteMe employs human operators who handle more difficult sites. The report notes that some brokers respond immediately, while others are much slower. For the more responsive sites, which is about half of them, DeleteMe keeps scanning for your info on a regular basis. For the rest, it checks before each quarterly report.
I had to wait several months to finish my initial review, waiting for the quarterly report. Since then, the reports have rolled in like clockwork. A gap in my subscription means the very first couple reports aren’t in my history, but all the recent reports remain available.
DeleteMe delivers reports in the form of PDF files that you could save or print, if you so desired. After a chatty letter explaining the process, the report offers a summary. According to my latest report, DeleteMe checked 3,732 records, found two records with six personal data items to be removed, and had just one data broker still pending removal. The summary estimated that I would have needed 19.5 hours to check all those sites myself and 1.5 hours to manage the removals, had I chosen to use the DIY opt-out instructions.
The report finishes with page after page of findings, six per page. It shows each broker’s logo, the average time required to remove data from that aggregator, and (in most cases) a smiling green icon labeled Clean, meaning your data is no longer present. In the rare case of a broker that still has your data, the report shows a quick summary of the types of data exposed.
Does DeleteMe Work?
The DeleteMe dashboard reports the current number of brokers tracked, but this number can be misleading. My contact at the company suggested de-emphasizing the precise number, because the field of brokers is so volatile. Reports, on the other hand, are a snapshot in time. My latest report included 48 data brokers. DeleteMe declared all but one to be clean, meaning my data wasn’t found, and noted that a removal request for the holdout was still in process.
Naturally, I had to check that claim, but it wasn’t easy. Surprisingly, the report does not contain any URLs for the tracked brokers, just a site logo image for each. I got a head start by downloading a list of “Sites We Remove From” found on the DeleteMe website. That list gave me 36 of the sites. I matched those against the report and identified most of the remaining ones. However, two were just not legible—I had to get those directly from my contacts at the company. I’d like an option to include the actual URLs in the report.
Next, I went down the list checking each broker for my data. As I did so, I began to appreciate the problem of defining an exact number of brokers. Such is the volatility of broker sites that four of them were no longer functional, three returning browser errors and one reporting its people search temporarily offline. Another four instantly redirected to other sites on the list. Working through the rest, I found exactly two that included information about me. All those two had was my name and an address that I vacated more than 20 years ago. I expect those two will be cleared again on DeleteMe’s next pass.
The broker sites themselves proved wildly diverse in their behaviors. The vast majority quickly responded with zero results. That makes sense; a database search typically takes just seconds. However, a sizable minority drew out the process in a completely fake manner, running multiple progress bars or animated data-sniffing dogs, describing ongoing searches, and providing plenty of opportunities to advertise their paid services. After investing five minutes or more, I found that to see what they found I’d have to pay cash. I didn’t.
Some of the brokers work strictly by checking phone number, not name. Those were harder to rate because there are two people previously associated with my current phone number. The mere presence of a hit doesn’t mean they found me, as opposed to some other previous user. At least I now know why I occasionally get calls and spam texts for “Cecily”! Many of the phone lookup sites refused to reveal even a trace of their findings without payment, but of those that did, none identified me personally.
I should point out that you’re likely to have a harder time checking up on DeleteMe if your name is less unusual than mine. I went back to one of the sites that found my ancient address and plugged in Dan Costa, PCMag’s Editor-In-Chief. It found 163 hits. Restricting the search to New York cut that down to 21, and I easily pinpointed the right one. Verifying the absence of his information would be a lot tougher than verifying my own, though.
Is DeleteMe for You?
Abine DeleteMe promises to delete your personal data from dozens of the most popular personal data aggregators, and it seems to do that job just fine. In the months from when we signed up for the latest quarterly report, its list of covered sites has grown steadily. Yes, you could make all the opt-out requests yourself and keep checking back in case the site picks up your data again. But if you want to make it tough for random people and businesses to get your personal information, paying DeleteMe a bit under $11 per month starts to seem quite reasonable.
