You have probably seen your favorite YouTube creator talk about a service that promises to erase your personal data from shady data brokers. In these ads, data deletion services like DeleteMe and Incogni are presented as a kind of magic wand. Sign up, sit back, and watch shady data brokers get pressured into removing your information so you can feel safer online. But think about it for a moment.
Why would a data broker ever want to delete your data simply because you asked?
If data brokers exist to collect, retain, and sell personal information, why would they willingly delete it? What incentive would a business built entirely around data retention have to let that data go?
What makes this more confusing is that companies that are not typically labeled as “data brokers” often refuse deletion requests outright, depending on where a consumer lives. Large consumer brands openly state in their privacy policies that certain categories of data cannot be deleted upon request. In some cases, those policies even describe the collection and inference of highly sensitive information, including health-related signals, without offering a meaningful opt-out.
So why do some companies comply while others refuse? Are data brokers legally required to delete information, or do they do so voluntarily? And when deletion does happen, what kind of data is actually being removed?
Those questions never come up in sponsored segments. But they are essential if you want to understand what data deletion services really do, and just as importantly, what they do not.
Most people imagine a data broker as a single kind of company: something vaguely shady that scrapes names, phone numbers, and addresses and sells them to anyone willing to pay. That image is not entirely wrong, but it is far from complete.
“Data broker” is an umbrella term that covers several very different industries. They collect different kinds of data, operate under different rules, and hold very different amounts of power. Treating them as one unified group makes the problem seem simpler than it is, and that simplification is convenient for marketing privacy tools.
The category most people are familiar with is people search services. These are the digital descendants of phone books. They list names, addresses, phone numbers, and often email addresses or social media profiles. Some include public records such as property ownership or arrest histories.
Because much of this information is visible for free, these sites are frequently used by landlords who do not want to pay for formal background checks, by private investigators, by reality television producers, and unfortunately by stalkers and doxxers as well.
What surprises many people is that most of these services do comply with deletion requests. Even when they are not legally required to, they often provide opt-out forms and remove listings. They do this not out of goodwill, but to reduce legal risk, regulatory attention, and negative publicity.
This is also the category that data deletion services focus on almost exclusively.
That distinction matters, because once you step outside people search services, the data ecosystem becomes much harder to escape.
Data deletion feels empowering because it is visible and measurable. Numbers go down. Listings disappear. But privacy is not restored by erasing fragments after the fact. It is preserved by preventing unnecessary collection before it happens.
Consider Personal Health Data brokers, which are among the most disturbing actors in this space. These companies collect health-adjacent data that is not protected by HIPAA, meaning it exists in a regulatory blind spot. This does not mean formal medical records. It means data derived from devices, apps, searches, browsing behavior, and purchases that imply health conditions or physical states. Searching for over-the-counter medication, reading articles about symptoms, or buying health products online can all generate signals that are collected and sold.
Even usage data can become health data. A smart toothbrush can reveal behavior patterns. A sleep tracker can reveal stress, insomnia, or cardiovascular indicators. Some smart mattress companies openly state in their privacy policies that they sell usage data to advertisers. That means your sleep quality, heart rate, and nightly patterns can be turned into marketing inputs. Poor sleep may lead to ads for sleep aids. Elevated heart rate may lead to ads for heart medication.
Health data can also be correlated with platform behavior. If physiological data suggests heightened emotional response while consuming certain content, platforms can infer engagement and amplify similar material because emotional reactions keep users active.
What makes this more unsettling is that data collection often continues even if you stop paying for premium features. You lose access. The signal remains.
Another largely invisible category is Risk Mitigation Data Brokers. These companies sit behind job applications, apartment rentals, and identity verification systems. Their role is to assess whether you are “risky.”
They collect contact information, address history, identifiers used to unify records, and financial behavior. Job instability, multiple jobs, rental history, and late payments can all surface here. You rarely interact with these companies directly, but their assessments shape access to housing and employment.
Financial Data Brokers, better known as credit bureaus, are even more entrenched. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion collect data you cannot opt out of and cannot delete. Participation is mandatory if you want to function economically in the United States.
They track debts, payments, credit applications, income estimates, and more. When this data is breached, the consequences are long-lasting. Even after massive breaches, these companies remain central to the financial system, largely untouched by meaningful reform.
Marketing Data Brokers are the most misunderstood group. They usually do not know your name, and they do not need to. They work with inferred data. Instead of identifying you directly, they build profiles based on patterns. Shopping habits, location ranges, commute length, media consumption, search behavior, and device usage are combined to form a highly specific picture of a person, without attaching a legal identity.
Individually, these traits do not identify anyone. Combined, they describe a single person with remarkable accuracy. The profile is anonymous enough to claim privacy, but precise enough to shape behavior. These profiles are tied to advertising IDs, cookies, and device identifiers rather than names. Resetting those identifiers can break the link, but as long as it exists, it is profitable.
The risk emerges when inferred data intersects with breached contact information. Scammers do not need to know who you are. They only need to know which messages you are most likely to believe. Precision matters more than identity.
This is where data deletion services enter the picture.
Services like Incogni and DeleteMe focus primarily on people search sites. They automate opt-out requests and present the results as thousands of removals. The numbers sound dramatic, but they are often inflated by counting individual data points rather than distinct brokers.
A single listing that includes multiple emails, addresses, and phone numbers can count as many removals even if much of the information is incorrect. These services do provide what they promise, and they are not scams. But they benefit from making the problem look broader than their actual reach.
They resemble VPN services in another way as well. The cost to provide the service is low, the price to consumers is relatively high, and the marketing is aggressive. In fact, some of these services are owned by the same parent companies behind popular VPN brands.
They are not useless, but they are not a solution. Unless you live in a jurisdiction with strong right-to-delete laws, your data will likely be recollected. Even then, most of the data ecosystem remains untouched.
The deeper issue is not deletion. It is collection.
In the United States, companies are largely free to collect, retain, and sell behavioral data with minimal oversight. Some states have passed privacy laws, but none meaningfully prevent unnecessary data collection at the source. The European Union takes a different approach. Regulations like GDPR restrict what can be collected in the first place. The same products behave differently there because the law requires them to. This failure is not partisan. Both major political parties have enabled it. Even executives at major technology companies have had their own data exposed in breaches.
There are no perfect individual solutions, but there are practical steps.
- You can pressure local representatives with specific examples drawn from privacy policies. Vague concern does little. Concrete misuse carries weight.
- You can reduce dependence on services built around surveillance, even if the transition is slow and inconvenient. Change does not happen overnight.
- You can block advertising. Advertising is the incentive engine for data collection. Blocking it weakens the system, and supporting creators directly helps offset the collateral damage.
- You can limit public exposure by being deliberate about where your real name appears and by tightening privacy settings across platforms.
None of this fixes the system. But it reduces how much of you is absorbed into it.
Data deletion feels empowering because it is visible and measurable. Numbers go down. Listings disappear. But privacy is not restored by erasing fragments after the fact. It is preserved by preventing unnecessary collection before it happens.
Until that changes, deletion services will continue to sell reassurance, companies will continue to hoard data, and breaches will continue to turn inference into exploitation.
That is the uncomfortable reality.
