DeleteMe was founded in 2010 and claims to be one of the oldest data deletion companies. Services like DeleteMe and its competitor Incogni work by contacting data brokers on your behalf and asking them to delete your personal information, including your current and previous mailing addresses, your phone number, 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 although it’s not a silver bullet to ensure a complete absence of unwanted communications from strangers and scammers, it does seem to have helped reduce the number of unsolicited marketing calls I receive. It also helped scrub personal information from my Google results, so you’re more likely to read an old article I wrote than see where I live.
Delete Me via Martin Szymar
I’ve also used Incognito, where I managed an account for my elderly mother. DeleteMe executive Jason Dalrymple says they got about the same results as could be expected. He says services like DeleteMe and others “do basically the same thing”. “We are bound by the same laws and constraints in compliance. It’s a game of cat and mouse.”
This is because the extent to which data brokers are required to cooperate with deletion companies’ requests is legally unclear, given that there is no comprehensive federal law in the US that regulates how private companies 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 have none. No matter where you live, data brokers cannot delete your information upon request. They may request further verification of your identity before complying with the request and confirming that the request has been accepted, they may deny the request, and they may ignore the request altogether – all actions requiring follow-up correspondence with the deletion service.
With DeleteMe and Incogni, you can track progress through a dashboard that provides at-a-glance updates on how many removal requests have been made and completed. A few more clicks will show you specific information about each broker, although most of these will be unfamiliar to ordinary users. The main difference that I noticed between DeleteMe and Incogni is that the dashboard of the former is not updated as frequently as the dashboard of the latter and it also does not show as many brokers being contacted.
I prefer the Incognito dashboard because it’s satisfying and reassuring to log in every few days and see the company 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, generates a report every few months showing progress on a small number of sites. Dalrymple argues that his company’s surgical approach is a feature, not a bug.
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