No service can delete your digital footprint. The honest numbers, from independent testing rather than marketing copy, run from 27 to 70 percent — and even that requires checking back every few months as data brokers refresh their databases

Data-removal services sell a version of privacy that sounds absolute: pay a subscription, and your name disappears from the internet’s back-alley data brokers. None of the services that actually do this work will put a number that high on it publicly. Look at what they say instead, and the more useful figures come from independent testing rather than company marketing: Consumer Reports’ 2024 field test found paid services removed between 27 and 68 percent of listings over four months, while a manual, unpaid opt-out effort — done by a person, not a subscription — outperformed every paid service at 70 percent.

That’s closer to an honest description of a fundamentally leaky system than it is a marketing failure.

Why the number isn’t higher

Data brokers aren’t a single database. They’re hundreds of separate companies, each buying, scraping and reselling personal information from different sources: public records, retail loyalty programs, app permissions, old data breaches. Removing a name from one broker doesn’t touch the roughly four thousand others operating in the U.S. Removal services work through this list methodically, but new brokers appear faster than any single company can chase them down, and the ones already on the list have between 30 and 45 days to respond to a takedown request, according to Security.org’s testing of these services.

The bigger issue is that removal isn’t permanent. DeleteMe’s own guidance notes that “many brokers re-scrape public and commercial sources,” which is why the same firm recommends “monthly or quarterly monitoring” rather than a one-time cleanup. A name removed in January can reappear in a broker’s database by spring, scraped fresh from a public record that never went anywhere.

The one place this is actually being tested at scale

California is currently running the closest thing the country has to a real-world experiment on whether “delete everything” is achievable, and the early results support the more modest number rather than the marketing pitch. Under the state’s Delete Act, nearly 600 registered data brokers were required to begin honoring bulk deletion requests starting August 1, 2026, through a state-run mechanism called DROP. After that first mass deletion, brokers are legally required to purge any newly collected data on a given resident every 45 days going forward, an acknowledgment, built directly into the law, that a single deletion event doesn’t hold. State Senator Josh Becker, who authored the bill, described its purpose plainly: “It lets us delete our information from these shadowy data brokers that collect our most personal information.” More than 300,000 Californians had already filed deletion requests through the state’s privacy portal before the August 1 deadline arrived, and the California Privacy Protection Agency has said noncompliant brokers face uncapped penalties that accumulate daily per violation.

What the Delete Act does not do is make removal permanent in any single-action sense. It makes re-removal mandatory and automatic on a 45-day cycle, which is a meaningfully different promise: not “gone,” but “continuously pushed back out.” That’s the same model the private removal services use, just enforced by state law rather than sold as a subscription. And it only applies to residents of one state. Everyone else in the country is still relying entirely on private services with no legal deadline forcing brokers to respond at all.

What regulators are finding when they actually look

The reason this industry can promise so little and still be worth paying for is visible in how rarely it gets checked by anyone with subpoena power. The Federal Trade Commission’s settlement with the data broker Kochava, finalized on May 4, 2026, is one of the few times regulators have shown, rather than described, what a broker was actually doing. Kochava and a subsidiary, Collective Data Solutions, had been collecting and reselling precise location data pulled from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, data granular enough, the FTC found, to trace visits to reproductive health clinics and places of worship. The settlement bars the companies from selling, licensing or sharing sensitive location data without a consumer’s explicit permission for the specific service requested. The FTC’s own language on the harm was blunt: consumers had “no way of avoiding the harm resulting from its collection and disclosure,” because the data was gathered through the ordinary background operation of apps on their phones, not through anything they had knowingly agreed to.

Kochava is one company among an estimated four thousand data brokers operating in the United States, by most industry counts, and one FTC settlement does not reset the practices of the other three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine. It does establish, in a way a privacy policy never will, that the underlying business model, collecting data through channels consumers don’t examine and reselling it to buyers consumers never meet, was operating exactly as critics of the industry have long described it. The settlement changes what one company can do with location data, without touching how many other companies are still doing the same thing with everything else.

What “70 to 80 percent” actually buys

It buys suppression of the largest, most-searched aggregators, the sites that show up when someone types your name into Google, plus continued monitoring to catch reappearances. It does not buy erasure from government records, court filings, property deeds, or any database a broker hasn’t scraped yet. It also doesn’t buy protection from a data breach at a company you’ve actually done business with, which is a different problem these services don’t touch at all.

It’s worth being specific about what falls outside that range, because the gap is where people tend to get caught out later. Voter registration files, property tax records, and court dockets are public by design in most states, and no removal service, including California’s, has the legal authority to pull them from the government systems that publish them. A data broker can be forced to stop reselling a scrape of that information. The underlying government record stays exactly where it was.

What this means in practice

The honest pitch for this industry isn’t “we’ll delete you.” It’s “we’ll keep pushing the same rock back up the hill, on a schedule, so you don’t have to.” That’s a real service, and California’s experience so far suggests it’s one that works reasonably well when a legal deadline forces every broker to respond rather than the handful an individual has the patience to chase down manually. It’s just a different service than the marketing copy implies, and a meaningfully worse one for the roughly 90 percent of Americans who don’t live in a state with anything resembling the Delete Act’s enforcement teeth behind it.