Five Services That Will Remove Your Personal Information From Data Broker Sites

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We’re living in a post-privacy world. Every time you leave the house you’re probably on camera. Every time you turn on your television, your viewing habits are being logged. And using the internet in any way is basically just spraying a firehose of your personal information at data brokers—companies that compile your personal information and sell it to marketing companies, people search sites, and anyone else who wants to use it to sell you something.

The phrase "data brokers" might conjure up a bunch of shady companies located in countries with loose privacy laws, but some of the biggest are actually familiar companies like Experian, LexisNexis, and Equifax. The data they gather can include your name, address, birthday, phone numbers, income, known associates (like your family members), and everything you do on social media platforms. Anyone with that info can use it to blast you with endless advertisements and spam emails and texts—and if bad actors get ahold of it in a data leak, they can use it maliciously to steal your identity.

If you want to beef up your online privacy and help protect yourself from spam and scams, one of the main things you need to do is get your personal data out of the data brokers’ servers. You can opt out manually (a tedious, never-ending game of whack-a-mole), or you can pay a service to do it for you.

You can try to opt-out manually

Typically you can choose to opt-out from data brokers and other sites that collect your data, but doing so involves a lot of work. You’ll have to go to each and every individual data broker’s website and look for their opt-out pages, which are typically deeply buried to discourage you. You’ll also need to stem the flow of information headed to them by adjusting the settings on your devices, removing unused apps, clearing your browser history and cache, setting it to forget cookies, and using Google “results about you” tool to remove search results containing your personal information. You might even start using a virtual private network (VPN) to remain as hidden as possible.

You’ll need to stay vigilant, however, and repeat this process on a regular basis, as even once deleted, your information will trickle back out over time.

The good news is, if you don’t want to make your privacy a full-time job, you can pay a service to do it for you. While most data removal services won’t be any more effective than manual efforts, they will do the boring work for you, saving you a ton of time.

The best online data removal services

There are a number of data removal services that can handle clearing your information from data brokers. Here are five of the most useful:

Optery

Optery has a free version that makes manually removing your data from broker sites a little bit easier, but the paid version covers a pretty comprehensive list of brokers, is AI-assisted, and offers removal verification. In one study, it was found to have a successful removal rate of 68%, which is just a hair under the 70% removal rate you can expect if you do it manually. It will continue with automated removals as long as you pay for the service.

Cost: $3.99 per month or $39 annually.

EasyOptOuts

With a second-best removal rate of 65%, EasyOptOuts is a relatively effective data removal tool that costs a lot less money than Optery, which is only slightly more effective. EasyOptOuts doesn’t have many fancy bells and whistles, but it slogs through all the online sites that collect your data and requests removal pretty reliably. It will even request removal from sites it can’t crawl, just to be safe. Considering how affordable it is, it’s a worthwhile choice.

Cost: $19.99 annually

IDX

IDX is an effective data removal service that has the most flexible platform in terms of services. It offers three tiers: Identity (mainly just monitoring, with no removal services), Privacy (probably the best choice if data removal is your priority), and Complete (which includes lots of other tools, like a credit locker).

Cost: $8.96/month (Identity), $11.66/month (Privacy), $32.90/month (Complete), with family plans also available

Kanary

Kanary also offers a free version that’s relatively limited and doesn’t help you with manual removal of your data—it just reports where your data has been located—but you can use it without a credit card, so you can test the service out before deciding whether to pay for it to actually remove your data from those sites. On the other hand, its app is only available for Apple devices, with a waitlist for Android phones and tablets. Some reviews have noted that Kanary’s net is a bit too wide, flagging your social media accounts for cleanup, which you probably don’t want it to do.

Cost: $12 per month or $105 annually (family plans are also available)

Permission Slip

Launched by Consumer Reports, Permission Slip is a free data removal service app. Some folks have raised privacy concerns about it due to its fairly complex user agreement, but for zero dollars it can definitely automate a lot of the work required to delete your private data from broker sites, and so it’s worth considering.

Cost: Free (donations appreciated)

Do you need one of these services?

Whether one of these services is a good deal for you depends on how much spare time you can donate to clearing up your data footprint, and how annoyed you are that faceless corporations know so much about you. You could always start with Permission Slip as a free option to see if it makes a difference, then evaluate a paid option later. But whether you do it yourself or pay someone to handle it, removing your personal data from data brokers is always a good idea, given data breaches have become a near everyday occurrence.