To modern global businesses, you’re not a customer—you’re the product. They gather every crumb of personal data you drop online and use the resulting profile to feed you ads, robocalls, even junk mail. It’s a whole ecosystem, with a layer of data brokers whose entire business involves scraping publicly available information and packaging you up for sale to bigger businesses, or to shadier entities. These aren’t criminals; data aggregation is perfectly legal. And using a privacy-protection service like Privacy Bee to rip your data from the grasping hands of these brokers is likewise legal. In the growing field of privacy helpers, Privacy Bee is among the most expensive, but it has by far the broadest scope.
What Does Privacy Bee Cost?
You can run a Privacy Bee risk assessment for free, as I’ll discuss below, but if you want the service to take any action, it costs $197 per year. That’s quite a lot—not everyone values their privacy so highly. When I asked the company’s CEO about that pricing, he pointed out that the service involves a substantial amount of hands-on work. He noted that among the company’s thousands of customers are “national politicians, A-list celebrities, top athletes, musicians, influencers, and even US government agencies protecting their most at-risk employees.”
With Optery, you choose from several pricing tiers, balancing the convenience of automated removal with the thriftiness of a lower price. At the free Basic level, Optery finds your data and details just how you can remove it yourself. The Ultimate level costs $249 per year, but handles all removals automatically. In between, you can pay $99 per year for the Core tier or $149 for the Extended tier; in each case, Optery handles most brokers but leaves some to you.
Abine DeleteMe focuses on removing your personal information from several dozen major data brokers. Like Privacy Bee, it uses a staff of human agents to augment automatic removal processes. And like Privacy Bee, it’s relatively expensive, at $129 per year. Protection for you and your partner costs $229 per year, or $329 for a family of four. Privacy Bee does let you manage protection for family members, but each member you add costs another $197 per year.
With The Kanary, you pay $9.99 per month or $89.99 per year to have your data cleared from various aggregator sites. Family protection comes as a bargain, $129.99 per year to protect up to six people.
IDX Privacy costs around the same as The Kanary, $9.95 per month or $79.95 per year. Note, though, that it does quite a bit more than remove your info from data brokers. This suite also includes Dark Web monitoring, identity theft remediation, a full-fledged Virtual Private Network, (VPN), and more.
From the well-known VPN purveyor Surfshark, Incogni takes a somewhat different approach. Rather than seeking brokers that hold your personal data and verifying removal of that data, it sends official removal requests to dozens of brokers that might have your data. When they respond, either to say they removed your data or they never had it, Incogni records a success. It doesn’t actively check that the broker removed your data. Month by month Incogni costs $7.99, but opting for a full year cuts that to $3.99, billed as $47.88 per year.
Like Incogni, Avast BreachGuard broadcasts removal requests to its list of brokers, without checking to see if they have your data. However, when we last reviewed the product, we found that list to be very small, barely over a dozen. At $39.99 per year, it’s less expensive than the rest, but it also does less to clear your data from broker sites. Monitoring the dark web for breaches involving your data is its focus.
In this pricing spectrum, Privacy Bee sits squarely at the top. As you’ll see, it’s also at the top in other ways, with far more data brokers covered than the rest, and more bonus privacy features.
Try Privacy Bee for Free
Before you splash the cash on a full Privacy Bee subscription, take it for a spin and kick the tires. It’s easy enough, as anybody can sign up for the service’s free risk assessment. According to the company’s CEO, “the free user basically gets everything except for when we have to put labor in,” things like dealing with data brokers.
Once you sign up, Privacy Bee displays its Risk Assessment page. A color-coded dial summarizes your privacy risk on a scale from 0 to 100. Next to the dial, a set of three icons reflect the fact that 24/7 Breach Monitoring is enabled, but Proactive Data Removal is not, nor is Data Brokers & People Search Sites Removal. Also listed are seven steps to improving your privacy. You’ve already completed the first one by signing up.
For the next privacy step, complete your profile. Privacy Bee asks for your full name, email, phone number, date of birth, and address. Many people have multiple email accounts and phone numbers; some even have multiple addresses. Privacy Bee just uses your primary information. At present, the only way to handle multiples would be to spin up another account using the secondary values. My company contact did say they’re exploring ways to include additional data points.
The free browser extension is currently available for Chrome and Firefox; an Edge extension is pending review. When you install the extension, you’ve knocked off the third step. I’ll discuss the extension in detail below.
That’s about all you can do on this page without triggering a prompt to purchase the Pro edition. Try to enable either type of data removal, click the Begin Protection button, ask to erase your “exposed personal info.” All of these actions trigger the upsell process. Scrolling down the page you find a list of the types of exposed personal data found—things like passwords, usernames, and email addresses. There’s also a list of data breaches that exposed your info. Here, too, clicking to take any kind of action triggers the invitation to subscribe.
That’s not to say you’ve exhausted the free possibilities. A menu down the left offers some intriguing choices. On the Email Scan page, you can give Privacy Bee permission to read all the messages in your Gmail account (support for Yahoo and Outlook mail is “coming soon”). This lets Privacy Bee identify the companies you interact with, giving you the chance to identify those you trust (or hate). Yes, even free users can do this, but I remain leery about giving away that much privacy (all my emails!) to protect my privacy. I’ll dig into the email scan below.
The Search Cleanup page shows typical search results based on your email and name. For each company that shows up you can click a button to signal that you trust (or distrust) the company. Additional tabs perform the same function for searches on your name and address, and on your name and phone number. However, clicking to populate those pages gets—you guessed it—an upsell prompt.
On the Data Brokers page, you see a list of all the data brokers and people search sites Privacy Bee tracks, 232 of them currently. The service checks a few sites for presence of your personal data, so you can see how it works. If you want a full scan with the option to get your data removed, that naturally requires a paid account.
Other actions, such as opting out from credit pre-screening offers are visible to free users, but not in an actionable way. Really, you can get a very good picture of what the service would do for you by thoroughly exploring the free version.
Tracker-Fighting Browser Extension
As noted, the browser extension is totally free. It does require a Privacy Bee login, which you get when you sign up for the free risk assessment. Once you’ve got it installed and logged in, you just sit back and let it block trackers for you.
How do these trackers do their tracking? In most cases it all comes down to cookies. Websites legitimately store cookies on your computer to let them save information between visits (or between pages on the site). But almost all modern websites include ads and other content supplied by third parties, and those parties can leave their own cookies. When the same ad supplier appears on multiple sites that you visit, that supplier can start tracking your online behavior and building a profile.
Tracker blocking has been around for years, enough so that the trackers have developed a new technology to circumvent traditional blocking. Called browser fingerprinting, this system uses the plethora of data your loose-lipped browser reveals to build a fingerprint that uniquely identifies you, for tracking purposes. Avast AntiTrack, Ghostery Privacy Suite, and Norton AntiTrack all include the ability to disrupt fingerprinting technology by manipulating the data sent by your browser.
Privacy Bee’s informative blog includes several articles about browser fingerprinting, but the product itself doesn’t visibly include any fingerprinter-foiling components. My contact at the company explained that most fingerprinters use scripts to capture much of the information they need, and Privacy Bee disables all third-party code on any sites you haven’t actively trusted.
Avast AntiTrack, Ghostery Privacy Suite, Norton AntiTrack, and most similar extensions signal the number of trackers on the current page by overlaying a number on the browser toolbar. Privacy Bee instead overlays an icon representing your trust relationship with the site. I’ll discuss the relationship system in detail below. Briefly, if you’ve actively chosen to trust or distrust the site, the overlay is a green check or a red X. Other sites display a grey question mark.
Clicking the toolbar icon brings up details on the current page’s trackers. Like most similar browser extensions, Privacy Bee lists all found trackers and indicates which were blocked, but it goes quite a bit beyond that.
To start, it offers a company analysis for the page itself, with a trust score and a stat for the percentage of Privacy Bee Pros (meaning paying customers) who’ve marked the site as trusted. You can click a link for additional details about the company. Below this pane is a chart of blocked tracking requests over time, along with stats for the time and disk space you’ve saved by not downloading blocked items.
The list of trackers provides more detail than most. In addition to each tracker’s Blocked or Allowed status, it lists the number of requests from that tracker and the percentage of Privacy Bee Pros who trust it. You can open an item for details on the precise URLs involved.
Opening an item also reveals a menu with three choices, the word Allow, a shield, and an X. Clicking the word toggles the item’s status between Blocked and Allowed (if it’s Allowed, the word changes to Block). Clicking the shield or X records a Positive or Negative relationship with the tracker—more about relationships below. If you’ve declared a Positive (trusted) relationship, that tracker will be allowed wherever it appears. I’d like to see a confirmation prompt, or at least a tooltip, so people don’t do this accidentally. Icons at the top (checkmark and X in this case) let you declare your relationship with the company itself.
Defeating Data Brokers
As noted, anybody can use the browser extension for free. Privacy Bee’s core protection, removing your personal data from online brokers, is reserved for paying customers.
Once again, these brokers aren’t breaking any laws. They simply gather information available to the public and organize it into personal profiles. By the same token, the law requires the brokers to remove a person’s data on receipt of a proper request to do so. Removal doesn’t keep them from scraping up your data again, though, which is why private data protection systems keep checking periodically.
Some data protection systems rely entirely on the legal process. Surfshark Incogni acts as your proxy, sending out official removal requests and recording the official response. The broker either indicates that the data was removed or that it was never present. Incogni doesn’t check that your data was present initially, nor that it was removed, relying instead on the severe legal repercussions if a broker lied. Avast BreachGuard’s Personal Info Remover component works in much the same way, but with a limited list of brokers.
DeleteMe checks over three dozen brokers and requests removal if it finds your personal data. Periodic reports list all the brokers, reporting precisely which data items (if any) are held by anywhere removal is still pending. The Forget Me component in IDX Privacy functions in a similar fashion. The Kanary reports on each individual data item when found, and again when removal is confirmed.
As for Privacy Bee, it scans well over 200 broker sites and identifies those holding your personal information. Like Incogni, it requests a limited power of attorney, so it can act as your proxy making formal requests for data removal. My company contact clarified that the power of attorney isn’t required, but it gives the removals team additional clout, especially in areas with privacy laws such as the CCPA and GDPR.
After I signed up for the service, it quickly displayed status for those hundreds of data brokers, showing my personal information as Not Found or Visible. By the next day, a couple of the Visible items had changed to Erased. In the summary at the top, it listed the number of data broker requests and the number actively pending removal. By that second day, these figures had grown to 30 and 10 respectively, and another day saw the number of requests swell to 68.
What about the other hundreds of trackers? Scrolling down, I found almost all of them were marked with the status Pending. My contact at Privacy Bee explained that typically the agents get some quick wins before the process slows down. “We are looking at this as a long-term protection for members,” he explained, “not a sprint out of the gate.”
Data Brokers by the Numbers
During my recent review of Incogni, I noticed that Incogni included none of the people search sites that seem to be DeleteMe’s specialty. There was no overlap at all. That got me to wondering. I put out a request for broker lists and received them from Privacy Bee (232 brokers), Optery (193 brokers), IDX Privacy (100 brokers), Incogni (76 brokers), and DeleteMe (38 brokers). I didn’t get a list from The Kanary, but I cobbled up a partial one using the data items of mine that it found.
With all the lists in hand, I held a private Excel party and came up with some numbers. Incogni remains the odd one out, sharing just two brokers with Privacy Bee and Optery, but none with the other services. Looking at the overlap between Privacy Bee and the others, I found plenty. Fully three quarters of the brokers tracked by IDX Privacy also show up in Privacy Bee’s list, as do two thirds of the brokers tracked by DeleteMe. Holding up Optery for comparison, I found that it covers two thirds of IDX Privacy’s list and three quarters of those covered by DeleteMe.
Privacy Bee and Optery share about 100 brokers in common, meaning each also tracks around 100 brokers that the other doesn’t. In the end, what’s important is how many brokers actually have your personal data. You might consider signing up at the free tier for both, just to see. Note that while Optery gives you a report within a few hours, Privacy Bee can take much longer to report its findings.
Fine-Tuning Relationships
You don’t really have a relationship with those data broker websites. You just want them to leave you and your data alone. For other sites, though, your relationship may be totally positive. PrivacyBee lets you identify your relationship with a huge number of popular sites as Positive, Negative, or a Custom trust level.
Click your name at top right and select Privacy Defaults from the resulting menu to review and possibly change what these relationships mean. By default, if you select a Positive relationship, it means you’re fine with the company using your data for non-marketing purposes and for 10 specific marketing purposes, but you don’t want them to share it with other companies. The marketing sub-choices may be ones you want to edit, perhaps to opt out of companies using your data for telemarketing, or facial recognition.
With your defaults defined, click Dashboard in the menu at left. Down the right side of the page, you’ll see a list of 10 popular companies. If you see any that are special favorites, click the checkmark icon to make them trusted. For those that aren’t of interest, click Skip. Either way, the item vanishes from the list, making room for new additions. It’s a nice way to let you set up your relationships without an overwhelming list in your face.
According to Privacy Bee’s CEO, the company’s workers “manually read the privacy policies of over 65,000 companies, analyzing how they work with privacy requests, and mapping out their proprietary data deletion process in detail.” If your favorite company doesn’t show up in the list at right, just use the search box. In testing the search feature, I found everything from PCMag’s parent company to my local grocery mini-chain. When you find an item by searching, you can choose a Positive, Negative, or Custom relationship. As expected, in a Custom relationship you can configure settings other than the defaults you set earlier.
The Search Cleanup page provides another view into websites that have information about you. It lists the results found by searching your name along with your email address, physical address, and phone number. For each site holding your data, it asks “Do you trust this company and want this info public?” You can click to choose a Positive or Negative relationship; choosing the latter will initiate the removal process.
There’s yet another way to identify relationships for the companies you deal with most if you’re willing to give Privacy Bee access to your Gmail account (support for Yahoo and Outlook accounts is “coming soon”). In the menu at left, click Email Scan. Follow the prompts to give Privacy Bee access to your account using a task-specific password. It will grind through your email, noting messages from known companies and sorting them by prevalence. For each company, you can click the checkmark or X to set a Positive or Negative relationship, or click the three-dot icon to set a Custom relationship. When you’re finished, I suggest you go back into your Google account and disable that task-specific password.
Beyond Brokers and Trust
Getting data brokers to clear out your data is a big move toward protecting your privacy. Identifying companies you trust and distrust with your information is another giant step. But Privacy Bee doesn’t stop there. On the Industry Opt-Outs page is a collection of other actions that the service can perform for you. You can have it opt you out from credit card prescreening offers, for example, and get yourself on the Do Not Call registry. It will send requests to several prolific junk mail senders, as well.
At the top of the list is “Privacy Bee Hive – Declared Preferences.” If you leave this item checked, you’re not opting out of anything. Rather, you’re giving permission for businesses that have signed a “Privacy Pledge” to access the relationship preferences you may have set for them. The pledge states they will honor those preferences.
In an approach to privacy I haven’t seen anywhere else, Privacy Bee even helps you opt out of Google Street View. Click Optional Actions from the menu, then click Blur My House on Google Street View. But don’t do that, not without thinking it over. This action is irreversible, as Google deletes all imagery of your house. If you plan to sell any time soon, potential buyers might be put off.
There are a few more choices in the left-side menu. On the Trusted Companies page, you can review the companies you’ve chosen to trust and optionally revoke your trust—though you can’t set a Custom relationship here. The My Family page lets you add and manage family members. And the Privacy Concierge page serves to get your questions answered by in-house experts. Note this is not live chat. During my testing it indicated a turnaround of five business hours.
Privacy Regained, for a Price
As the world chips away at privacy more and more, the market for privacy-protecting services like Privacy Bee keeps growing. If you’re a well-known personage, having control of where your private information is and isn’t held can be critical. If you’re just an average citizen, Privacy Bee’s broad selection of protective services can still shield you from ads, robocalls, junk mail, and even identity theft. It all comes down to whether you’re willing to pay the substantial price for its substantial services.
Optery, on the other hand, makes pricing tiers available not just for the rich but for anyone at all. For exactly zero dollars it will search most of its broker list, identify in detail where your data resides, and help you with opting out manually. At higher pricing tiers, it does more and more of the work. Finally, its Removals Report provides unequalled verification that your data really was removed. Both products have their virtues, but we’ve identified Optery as our Editors’ Choice in the realm of data broker removal services.
