Does DeleteMe Actually Get Your Info off the Internet? I Tried It
Recent estimates approximate that there are 16.4 billion Google searches per day globally. A huge portion of those searches is for people’s names. Of those names, many are likely public figures, like Lionel Messi, Sabrina Carpenter, or any number of politicians doing something nefarious. But a great many of the name searches are ostensibly for normies. Maybe even you. Definitely me, based on the deluge of spam calls I get.
DeleteMe was founded in 2010 and claims to be one of the oldest companies in data removal. Services like DeleteMe and its competitor Incogni work by contacting data brokers on your behalf and getting them to remove your personal information, including your current and past mailing addresses, your phone numbers, and your email address. Theoretically, this process removes you from annoying marketing lists and makes it harder for randos to find you. I've used DeleteMe since January, and while it's not a silver bullet for ensuring the complete absence of unwanted communication from strangers and scammers, it seems to have helped with the number of unsolicited marketing calls I get. It also helped clean up personal info from my Google results, so you're more likely to read an old article I wrote than see where I live.
I have also used Incogni, where I managed an account for my elderly mother. She got similar results, which is to be expected, says DeleteMe executive Jason Dalrymple. Services like DeleteMe and others “all basically do the same thing,” he says. “We're bound by the same laws and constraints in compliance. It's a cat-and-mouse game.”
That’s because the degree to which data brokers need to cooperate with the requests of deletion companies is legally murky, given that there’s no comprehensive federal law in the US that regulates the way private companies can use personal data. Rather, most regulations are at the state level, where protections are varied (I live in Missouri, where I feel lucky to have running water). Some states, like California, have more protections, while many states have none. Regardless of where you live, data brokers aren’t necessarily just going to delete your information upon request. They may request further verification of your identity before complying and confirming the request was granted, they may deny the request, and they may ignore the request completely—all actions that require follow-up correspondence with the deletion service.
With DeleteMe and Incogni, you can track progress via a dashboard that provides an at-a-glance update on how many removal requests have been made and fulfilled. A few more clicks will show you specifics on each broker, though most of these will be unfamiliar to typical users. The main difference I noticed between DeleteMe and Incogni is that the former’s dashboard doesn't update as often as the latter’s and also doesn't show as many brokers being contacted.
I prefer the Incogni dashboard because it's satisfying and reassuring to log in every few days and see that the company is crawling the web and busting brokers, each of which it rates based on their speed and general compliance. There are constant status updates for thousands of websites. DeleteMe, on the other hand, creates a report every few months showing progress on a smaller number of sites. Dalrymple argues that his company's surgical approach is a feature, not a bug.
“It can actually exacerbate the problem [to work faster and cast a wider net] because they send your information out to these companies to make sure they don't have it—but then they have it,” he says. “They're adding databases that you're never going to be on, where you have less than a one in 100,000 chance to be, and then your information is being sent all over.”
It's a fair point, but comparing the efficacy of each service is nearly impossible, given all the factors involved. Even so, Dalrymple makes a convincing case for what he calls DeleteMe's “more bespoke approach” to privacy and the fair use of your data, which involves looking at who has what and how they're using it, as opposed to automating removal blasts to the biggest number of data brokers possible.
You also can't argue with DeleteMe’s longevity—it's among the longest-standing in the space and has customers who have been on for eight-plus years. The average user stays for three years. Again, having spam calls disappear overnight is not a reasonable expectation from a data-removal service like DeleteMe or any of its competitors, so signing on with one of the providers should come with an expectation that you’ll be with them for a bit of time.
I'm old enough to remember when the Do Not Call registry did just that. That database still exists, but it isn’t really functional, as it won’t block you from receiving unwanted calls from several entities, including charities, political parties, people conducting surveys, and more. The list also won’t offer any help with managing your digital footprint. (In fact, some theorize that joining the registry may actually further compromise your data, as you’re adding your information to yet another list.) Gradually shrinking that footprint is a long game, and DeleteMe has been playing it the longest.
For perspective, when DeleteMe started, Meta was still a private company called Facebook. At the time, everyone was extremely excited about posting everything they could about themselves to the internet. DeleteMe executive Jason Dalrymple remembers swimming against a hard current while pitching venture capitalists on a data-removal company.
"Everybody was excited to share; no one was thinking about the implications of all that data being shared," he says. “Everyone told us: Privacy's dead, privacy's dead, privacy's dead.”
Privacy may, in fact, be dead—perhaps by refusing to post to their Instagram grids, maybe Gen Z will bring it back. But if you're tired of being hassled and crept upon, it may be worth $100 for a year of someone working to roll things back for you.
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