A person pays for a data removal service, gets a report saying 400 listings were deleted, and searches their own name a month later. The name is still there, on a people-search site the service does not cover, in a court record it cannot touch, and in a news article it has no right to remove. The service did what it promised. The promise was narrower than the ad suggested.
The honest version of the pitch is this: removal services are good at the bulk job, deleting your listing from the hundreds of data brokers that buy and sell personal information, and bad at everything else. Knowing the boundary is the difference between a useful subscription and a disappointed one.
DeleteMe costs 129 dollars a year, covers more than 750 brokers, and sends quarterly reports on what was removed. Incogni costs 6.49 dollars a month, covers more than 200 brokers, and runs continuously. Optery offers a free scan that shows where your information appears, then charges for the removal work. All three file opt-out requests on your behalf, track which brokers complied, and re-file when a listing comes back.
The re-filing is the real work. Brokers rebuild their records from fresh data, so a listing removed in January can be back by June, assembled from a new data source the broker bought. A service that files once and stops is worthless. A service that files quarterly is doing the job.
Court records, property records, and voter rolls are public records, and no removal service can delete them. News articles are protected speech, and no service can force a publisher to take one down. Your own social media posts are yours to delete, and no service will do it for you. Credit bureaus are regulated separately, and a removal service has no standing to dispute a credit file.
The FTC's guidance is blunt about the limits: opt-out requests work against brokers that sell personal information, and they do not work against the public record. A person whose address appears in a property record needs a different strategy, usually an address privacy service or a trust, not a broker removal subscription.
California's Delete Act created the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, DROP, which lets a California resident file one deletion request that goes to every registered broker. Brokers have to check the platform at least every 45 days since August 1, 2026, and delete the information within 45 days of the request. Registration is due January 31 every year, and the penalties for ignoring a request run 200 dollars per deletion request per day.
DROP is free, and for a California resident it does the bulk job the paid services charge for. The paid services still add value for the brokers that are not registered in California and for the re-filing work, but the free option should be the first step, not the last resort.
Keep reading: California's Delete Act Went Live: One Request to 600 Brokers, The Opt-Out That Asks for Your ID: When Verification Becomes the Risk, Bing Has Its Own Removal Tools: The 90-Day Block Google Never Tells You About cover the nearby cases in this series.
From the brokers they cover, yes, and the listings come back as brokers rebuild from fresh records, which is why the services re-file quarterly. They cannot touch court records, property records, voter rolls, news articles, your own social posts, or credit bureaus.
DeleteMe covers more than 750 brokers for 129 dollars a year, with quarterly reports. Incogni covers more than 200 brokers for 6.49 dollars a month. Optery offers a free scan and charges for the removal work.
In California, yes. The Delete Act's DROP platform lets a resident file one request that goes to every registered broker, free. Brokers must check at least every 45 days and delete within 45 days. It covers registered brokers only.
Brokers rebuild their records from fresh data sources. A listing removed in January can be back by June, assembled from a new source the broker bought. Re-filing quarterly is the job, not a failure of the service.