Recent estimates are approximate that they exist 16.4 billion Google searches per day international. Most of that search it is for people’s names. Of those names, many could be famous people, like Lionel Messi, Sabrina Carpenter, or any number of politicians doing something bad. But many name searches are common. Maybe even you. I certainly am, based on the flood of spam calls I get.
Delete Me was founded in 2010 and claims to be one of the oldest companies in data abstraction. Services like DeleteMe and its competitor It is unknown act by contacting the data agent on your behalf and having them remove your personal information, including your current and previous email addresses, your phone numbers and your email address. In theory, this process removes you from major marketing lists and makes it harder for a lottery to find you. I’ve used DeleteMe since January, and while it’s not a silver bullet for ensuring the complete absence of unwanted communications from strangers and scammers, it seems to have helped with the number of unsolicited marketing calls I get. It also helped clean up personal information from my Google results, so you’re more likely to read an old article I wrote than see where I live.
DeleteMe by Martin Cizmar
I have also used Incogni, where I managed my elderly mother’s account. He got the same result, which is to be expected, says DeleteMe chief executive Jason Dalrymple. Services like DeleteMe and others “all basically do the same thing,” he says. “We are bound by the same rules and restrictions in compliance. It is a game of cat and mouse.”
That’s because the extent to which data brokers need to cooperate with data erasure companies’ requests is clear in law, given that there there is no absolute federal law in the United States that controls how private companies can use personal data. Instead, most regulations are at the state level, where protections are different (I live in Missouri, where I feel lucky to have running water). Some states, like Californiahave more protection, when many states do not. Regardless of where you live, data agents do not have to delete your information after a request. They can request further verification of your identity before complying and confirm the request has been accepted, they can reject the request, and they can ignore the request altogether—all actions that require communication tracking and deletion service.
With DeleteMe and Incogni, you can track progress through a dashboard that provides instant updates on how many removal requests have been made and fulfilled. A few more clicks will show you the specifics for each broker, although many of these will be unfamiliar to the average user. The main difference I noticed between DeleteMe and Incogni is that the former dashboard doesn’t update as often as the latter and it also doesn’t show how many brokers are communicating.
I prefer the hidden dashboard because it’s satisfying and motivating to log in every few days and see that the company is crawling the web and neutering agents, which they each rate based on their speed and overall compliance. There are frequent status updates for thousands of sites. DeleteMe, on the other hand, creates a report every few months showing progress on a small number of sites. Dalrymple says that his company’s surgical approach is a feature, not a bug.
