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How many times have you received a notification that your data was exposed in a breach? It’s alarming how often it happens these days—and losing your privacy because someone hacked into online data storage isn’t your only worry. Data brokers scour the non-dark web for publicly available information, then aggregate their findings to create personal profiles. There’s a lucrative market for these profiles. Buyers range from advertisers to people search websites to identity thieves. Yes, you can legally command any of these data brokers to remove the data they’ve stored about you, but how do you know which ones are selling your profile?
Personal data removal services arose to address this predicament. A good one will check hundreds of sites to locate your personal data, handle the opt-out process for you, and keep an eye out for when the brokers inevitably pick your data back up again. How do these services work, and why should you pay someone to do what you can (theoretically) do yourself? We're here to explain.
What Data Do Brokers Collect?
Collecting personal data is a little bit like rolling a snowball. At the core is your full name and email or phone number. Once the broker has those nuggets of information, they use them to collect more details to flesh out the profile. The more details they get, the more they can pick up.
Adding your address significantly enhances the profile. For people search sites, it lets users narrow the search by state or city. Those sites also benefit from a profile that includes your birthdate or age. Knowing one or more previous addresses helps lock down the profile. Your Social Security number (SSN) is, of course, a rare jewel—a profile including your SSN is highly valuable to identity thieves.
Other adornments to a personal profile include things like your occupation, education level, hobbies, purchases, and even political leanings. Security giant McAfee maintains a data broker info page that lists most of these data points, among other useful details.
How Do You Know Brokers Have You Data?
If you want to see your level of exposure, just type your name into your favorite search engine. If you have a common name, add a city or state. A search on “John Smith” returns an impossible deluge of results. Restricting it to something like “John Smith Pahrump Nevada” could help bring those results under control.
Some of the results from your search might well link to websites that specialize in finding people, such as PeopleFinder, Spokeo, or ThatsThem. You can go to these sites directly to confirm whether your information is present, but be warned—these aren't public utilities. They exist to earn money. Typically, you’ll slog through many pages with lengthy progress bars and plenty of ads. Eventually, you’ll wind up with just enough data to say, “Yeah, that’s me.” Want more? It’ll cost you.
The best way to gauge how widely available your profile is on the internet is to have one of the removal services make you a list for free. You can launch a free search from the Privacy Bee website, for example. Kanary and Optery also offer free service levels.
Can You Remove Your Data Profile From Brokers Without Help?
If you have the time and persistence, you can contact brokers that hold your data and request that they remove it. The removal services will even help you, at least as far as telling you what to say and who to ask. Privacy Bee maintains an online guide detailing how to request removal from data brokers. Optery’s online database lists over 600 data brokers with individualized opt-out instructions. DeleteMe offers a quick visual letting you know the difficulty level for each set of opt-out instructions.
(Credit: Abine/PCMag)There is one small catch. When you contact a broker, you confirm that the profile they created belongs to a real person. Privacy Bee is among the services that recommend using a temporary email address to contact brokers.
What Can a Personal Data Removal Service Do for You?
As noted, many personal data removal services make detailed DIY instructions available. For many users, grinding through the process once or twice will be an eye-opener. After that experience, hiring a service to remove your data for you starts to look more and more attractive. And the services have resources beyond what you can do for yourself.
With simple people-search sites, the removal service handles opt-out much like you would, except that it automates the job. In addition, when a service handles your opt-out, you don’t give the broker your email address.
The biggest data aggregators don’t have a public face. Optery CEO Lawrence Gentilello points out, “The majority of data brokers are selling data to other businesses privately, outside of the public eye, for example, for things like direct mail and email marketing.” These non-public brokers are the source of information for people-search sites, advertising analysts, and the like. You can’t just look yourself up on these sites.
Data removal services have ways of clearing your data from such non-public sites. They might contract with the broker to get information using an API or arrange to submit queries in large batches. They have the resources to generate legal documents enjoining the broker to supply and delete all information they hold about you. This level of legal action is beyond what many consumers can manage.
Having made the opt-out request, the service typically monitors to make sure the data actually gets removed. Optery makes a point of capturing before and after screenshots when possible. And your ongoing subscription gets you ongoing protection. If a broker captures your data all over again, the service removes it all over again. Imagine working through a list of 20 or 30 manual data removal requests, only to have to do it again next month.
(Credit: Optery/PCMag)Of course, there will always be occasions when automated removal doesn’t work. Maybe the broker changed their format or just failed to respond. The best removal services maintain a cadre of human operators to take over when automation fails. They do much the same as you would yourself...except that they’re experts at it.
Can You Trust Personal Data Removal Services?
When you use a VPN service, all your data flows through that company's servers, so you really have to trust in the company's reputation. Likewise, you give a broad collection of private information to your personal data removal service, trusting it won't misuse that data. In either case, reputation is everything. A service that loses the trust of its customers might not survive.
Removal service OneRep has run into trouble in the past due to its founder also being the founder of several broker sites. Security maven Brian Krebs blew the whistle on this connection last year. In 2025, he revived those concerns because Mozilla’s Monitor Plus service still relies on OneRep despite promising to find a different source. Naturally, OneRep has a clear explanation of how its processes keep your data safe, and it’s fairly convincing. But the concern remains.
Sometimes, your service needs to request removal from a non-public broker without knowing that your data is present. In theory, that contact could cause the broker to start profiling you, but it’s unlikely. According to Harry Maugans, CEO of Privacy Bee, “Most of our requests are done under privacy legislation, which has strict laws around usage, meaning if the data broker did use the record for nefarious purposes, that'd be blatantly illegal and not worth the risk to steal a record that's probably valued at a few cents to them.”
What’s Your Privacy Worth?
What data brokers do isn’t illegal. Still, if you value your privacy enough to want your profile gone from data aggregator sites, you should thoroughly consider what privacy is worth to you. Opting out manually takes significant time and effort, and it isn’t as effective as using a professional removal service. As you can see from our top picks, services range from $39 to several hundred dollars per year. Once you’ve sorted out your budget, you can make an informed choice. Whatever price you decide to pay, rest assured it's worth it.