They are a legitimate service. Whether you should use them or not is something you need to decide for yourself.

One of the biggest things they are good for is not giving all of your information away. A lot of these privacy companies simply spam out all of your information and request for the company to delete anything that matches that.

So for instance, if you signed up to a website newsletter with your email, they have your email address. And that's it. Then comes a "privacy" company that send them your email address, name, home address, etc and asks them if they have any of this data then they need to delete it. That's asinine and backwards.

DeleteMe doesn't do this. They are more specific with how they process the data removal requests.

I'm not advocating for them, I don't use them and probably never will. I have no idea if they are a good company or decent at what they claim to do. I just know they don't do the spam technique.

Personally, any company that is a mass sponsor of YouTube channels is something I won't trust myself. But that's just my weird litmus test.

Not to be confused (like me) with this great service. https://justdeleteme.xyz/

And not sure what happened to the old cool URL of justdelete.me

If I remember from Reject Convience they will spend 6 months to email 2-3 companies to delete your data. (I listen to these to fall asleep to. I may be missing some facts)

In reality they do help superficially, but they very much inflate their numbers on a shiny dashboard, showing you how much they're helping. All while only hitting a small fraction of databrokers.

I also think, that as a subscription solution to a problem, they could turn into the online version of turbotax any second now. Lobbying for harder self-optouts so that their service stays relevant.

IIRC, they’re not a scam, but they also aren’t doing anything you couldn’t do yourself. They’re just sending opt-out requests to data brokers on your behalf.

If you want that service, don't consider anything else besides EasyOptOuts, it's both the cheapest and most effective option.

Reject Convenience did a pretty good breakdown of DeleteMe, Incogni and the data broker industry on their YouTube channel a while back. It’s a good overview but, fair warning, it might send you down a bit of a rabbit hole after watching.

video

"Your Privacy is our Business" is also a Google slogan

If you have a Discover card, they offer a service like this for free. I'm not sure how good it is, but since they already have my information I figured it was fine to use their service instead of increasing my footprint by passing my info to another company. It also hasn't found anything since I started using it because I did what they do manually, years ago.

There are several companies that do this.
Even Mozilla did until this month.

DeleteMe seems not to be the best. They might sell data to places while getting it removed from other places.

I just signed up with Incogni which is one of the biggest.

Several of the big privacy people have recommended them online, e.g. Techlore, so I'd say yes. Though it's been a couple years since I saw those reviews, and I haven't read up on them recently.

EDIT: Grammar.

heard that stuff like deleteme and incogni sell your data to other places so if you ever stop subscribing so I'd avoid it myself 🤷

you can do it yourself, find a list of brokers and send the same mail/pdf or whatever to them all