You Can Hire Real Humans to Scrub Your Personal Data off the Internet With DeleteMe

Ever Google yourself? Of course you have. Lots of intimate details pop up, don’t they? Things like your birthday, place of birth, past addresses, spouse and family members, and perhaps worst of all, your precious phone number.

It’s how a lot of creeps, nags, and piece-of-s—t scam artists find your information so that they can leave you a voicemail offering you a bulls—t extended car warranty or email over a PayPal phishing attempt.

You can hire a service that takes down your personal information from these websites, though. It’s called DeleteMe, and it does just what its name hints at.

Here’s why your info shows up online

These websites that list all your private information for public consumption (and commercial use, both legitimate and otherwise) are called data brokers, and they suck the life out of humanity. Many of them will acquiesce to requests to take down your information, but few of them make it quick or easy.

You could easily waste dozens or hundreds of hours searching for which data brokers have your information publicly posted, finding the contact info by which to reach them, and drafting your requests. Outsourcing it to a service like DeleteMe saved me a lot of time when I tested it.

Every three months, real humans working for DeleteMe search for your personal information and contact the data brokers to demand they take it down from their websites. You receive quarterly reports throughout the year that show which data brokers removed your info and which specific info was taken down.

DeleteMe doesn’t take down everything, but in my experience, it takes down most of it. Some data brokers don’t respond to their requests. And even when a data broker successfully responds and takes down your information, there’s no law on the books that says they can’t just add it back later.

I know. America’s privacy laws are crap and full of more holes than a screen door. But in my experience, it takes a bit of time for brokers to add back your information. It doesn’t happen overnight.

So yes, you do need to stay subscribed to DeleteMe (or a service like DeleteMe) in order to keep your information mostly off the web in the long term. If you use it once and then cancel, you’ll find that over time, your information will slowly and gradually begin to repopulate on the same data brokers’ websites.

Think of it like weeding the garden. You can’t just weed once and then expect new weeds to never grow back. But if you weed it regularly—or better yet, hire a gardener in the form of DeleteMe—you can keep the weeds from trying to call you up and scam you out of money. Or something like that.