Data removal services compared: what you get for the subscription

Data removal services all promise roughly the same thing: give us your details once, and we will keep asking data brokers to delete you. Compared side by side, though, they sell quite different subscriptions. Some mostly chase the people-search sites that show your address to strangers. Some send requests to hundreds of brokers you will never see. Some do the work with staff, some almost entirely with software, and one is mainly an identity theft plan with removals folded in.

This piece lines up six of them: DeleteMe, Incogni, Optery, Kanary, Aura and PrivacyHawk. How we compared: we read each company's own plan pages, help-center articles and refund terms as they stood in late 2026, along with Consumer Reports' published evaluation of removal services; we did not run any of the services ourselves.

Privacy toolkit for this job

• NordPassEmail Masking (Premium and Family plans) gives each form its own forwarding address, so brokers never get your main inbox.Start with NordPass

Picked from published documentation and reviews, not our own testing. We earn a commission from some services we link to. The full Privacy kit

What a subscription actually buys

Strip away the dashboards and a removal service does three jobs. It looks for you on a list of sites. It files an opt-out or deletion request wherever it finds you, or wherever it predicts you are. And it repeats both on a schedule, because listings come back when a site loads fresh records.

What none of them can do is just as consistent across the industry. They cannot change public records at the county office or the courthouse. They cannot make a site comply that ignores requests, or one that refuses requests filed by anyone but you. They cannot remove news stories. And to do their work, each one needs your full name, date of birth and addresses, which makes it one more company holding your file.

The criteria, in the order I would weigh them

1. Which sites, and what kind

"Brokers covered" is the headline number on every pricing page, and it is the least comparable. A service that lists 420 brokers may include many private-database companies that sell data to marketers and never publish a page about you. A service that lists 100 sites may be almost all people-search sites. If your concern is a stranger finding your address, ask how many people-search sites are on the list, and whether the big ones you already found are among them.

2. How often requests repeat

Monthly, every 60 to 90 days and quarterly are all common. Faster is not automatically better, since many brokers take weeks to act anyway, but anything slower than quarterly leaves a relisted page up for a long stretch.

3. What the report shows

A useful report names each site, shows what it held, and says whether removal is requested, in progress or confirmed. Screenshots, where offered, let you check the service's work against your own searches.

4. Custom requests

You will eventually find a site that is not on the list. Some plans let you send links without limit, some cap or exclude them, and some charge more for them.

5. Getting out

Look at the refund window, whether the plan renews automatically, and how you cancel.

Six services, side by side

All details below are as each company describes them on its own pages at the time of writing.

Reading the table, one service at a time

DeleteMe is the long-running choice for US people-search sites. Its help center says your first privacy report arrives within about seven days and then four times a year, and that you can list up to six names, addresses, phone numbers and emails. It also says PeopleConnect, the company behind Intelius, TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, does not accept opt-outs DeleteMe files for customers, so you would still do those yourself. DeleteMe works in the US and, it says, eleven other countries.

Incogni aims wider, at the private brokers as well as the public ones, and it operates across the US, Canada, the UK and the EU. Because most private brokers cannot be searched, its help center says it predicts which ones probably hold your data and sends requests to them, so some requests go to companies that never had your file. Its 60 and 90 day intervals were confirmed in a limited assurance report by Deloitte in August 2025. I compared Incogni with DeleteMe in more depth in DeleteMe vs Incogni.

Optery is the one with a real free tier: a scan that shows where you appear, with links to each site's own opt-out. Its paid plans file requests monthly. The entry plan is fully automated and limited to one name and one city, while the middle plan adds unlimited name variations and past cities plus before-and-after screenshots about every 90 days. Its help center lists a handful of countries beyond the US.

Kanary frames its work around your exposure as a whole, including search results and social media, not just broker lists. Its entry plan scans and files requests monthly and emails a report once a month; the higher plan scans weekly and adds unlimited custom removals, some at extra cost. It says it is designed mainly for US residents and has expanded to the UK.

Aura is primarily an identity theft protection product, with credit and account monitoring, and broker removal comes inside its plans. Its page says it covers more than 425 brokers and people-search sites, rescans daily and re-sends requests when data reappears, with processing taking up to 30 days. For brokers it cannot automate, it offers assisted removals that you trigger.

PrivacyHawk runs as a phone app. Beyond data brokers, it sends deletion and do-not-sell requests to ordinary companies that hold your data, and it gives you a privacy score. Its paid plans add automatic monthly removals; family plans cover four people, and it says you can cancel at any time in the app settings. The current plans are listed on the PrivacyHawk site.

What the independent evidence says

There is less of it than the marketing suggests. The most cited source is Consumer Reports' report "Data Defense: Evaluating People-Search Site Removal Services", published in August 2024. Working with the safety group Tall Poppy, it signed 28 volunteers up for seven services between May and September 2023 and had researchers opt four more out by hand, then checked 13 people-search sites at one week, one month and four months.

Its findings, in short:

• Across all the services, only 35 percent of the profiles found at the start were gone after four months.
• Manual opt-outs did better, at about 70 percent, and most of that happened in the first week.
• Optery (68 percent) and EasyOptOuts (65 percent) had the highest removal rates. Kanary reached 34 percent and DeleteMe 27 percent.
• Some removal services advertised on or partnered with people-search sites.

Consumer Reports was careful about the limits: a small group, services given only a name, current address and date of birth, and volunteers who never opened a dashboard or answered a follow-up question. Incogni, Aura and PrivacyHawk were not part of it, and every service has changed since 2023. Read it as evidence that paying does not replace checking, not as a ranking.

The free routes, and how far they go

Doing it yourself. The work is tedious rather than difficult. Our guide to removing your information from people-search sites has the routes for the big sites in a sensible order. Expect one long evening, then an hour or so each quarter.

California's DROP. If you live in California, the state's free Delete Request and Opt-out Platform sends one deletion request to every registered data broker, and since August 2026 those brokers must process the list at least every 45 days. That covers a lot of what the paid services file on the broker side. It reaches registered brokers only and does nothing for search results. The rules are in California's Delete Act and DROP.

Free scans. Optery's free tier and the people-search sites themselves will show you where you appear without charging you. Our exposure quiz gives a rough sense of how much is likely out there before you start.

Worth it or not: a quick sort

A subscription tends to earn its keep if:

• you have lived at many addresses or changed your name, so there are dozens of listings to chase;
• your listings keep coming back and you know you will not keep up a quarterly recheck;
• you have a safety reason to keep your address off the internet and want someone else watching it, alongside the advice of a victim advocate if that applies to you;
• you live outside the US in a country where a service files requests under local privacy law and you would not otherwise know where to send them.

You can probably skip it if:

• a search for yourself turns up only a handful of sites;
• you live in California and are mainly worried about brokers rather than search results;
• you are comfortable spending an evening on forms and setting a reminder for three months out.

If you do subscribe, write down where you appear before you sign up, check the first report against that list, and decide at renewal time, with a year of reports in hand, whether it did the job.

Your next three steps

1. Run the free route first: the opt-out guide covers the big sites in an evening.
2. If you pay, keep the opt-out checklist anyway, for the sites a service does not cover.
3. Check what a service files against what DeleteMe and Incogni publish about their coverage before you choose.