Everything Dataremoval does for you, written out so you can do it yourself for nothing. That is not
a strange thing for us to publish. Anyone who reads one of these and does the work has understood
exactly what the service is worth.
One free request that reaches every registered data broker in California. What DROP covers, what it quietly does not, and why you should still opt out by hand.
The California Delete Act (Senate Bill 362) created DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, which lets a California resident send a single free deletion request to every data broker registered with the state. Consumers have been able to file since January 1, 2026, and since August 1, 2026 registered brokers must access DROP and process those requests at least once every 45 days. As of July 1, 2026, 322,292 Californians had filed. DROP reaches registered brokers only, so it does not touch the several hundred that never registered.
To remove your personal information from the internet, work in this order: opt out of the people-search sites that publish your home address, then the background-check sites, then the marketing aggregators that feed them, then request removal of any remaining personal information from Google search results. Budget about 20 hours for a first pass across the major brokers, and re-check every one to three months, because listings reappear as new public records are ingested.
To opt out of data brokers, submit a removal request to each broker individually, because there is no single form that reaches all of them. Start with the people-search sites that publish your home address for free, then the background-check sites, then the marketing aggregators upstream of both. California residents can also use the state DROP platform to send one deletion request to every registered broker at once.
The honest answer: you almost certainly cannot delete it. Here is what you can do instead, and why the services promising deletion are selling you monitoring.
You cannot reliably remove personal information from the dark web. Once data is in a breach dump it has been copied to many hosts, and no company can compel their deletion. What is actually possible is monitoring for your data in known breach corpora, then reducing the damage: change exposed passwords, freeze your credit, and remove the public sources (data brokers) that let someone tie a leaked email to your home address.
Why security teams are buying data removal for staff, what it costs per seat, which roles to cover first, and how to tell a real enterprise offering from a repackaged consumer plan.
Data broker removal for businesses removes employees' home addresses, phone numbers, and family details from people-search sites, so an attacker cannot buy the raw material for a pretext call, a SIM swap, or a visit to someone's house. Priced per seat, it typically runs $50 to $150 per employee per year. Cover executives, finance approvers, IT admins, and anyone publicly named first, because those are the roles social engineers target.
DeleteMe and Incogni both remove your personal information from data brokers, but they trade differently. DeleteMe uses human-verified removals and a quarterly report at $129 a year, billed annually only. Incogni automates opt-outs across a wider broker roster for $7.99 a month billed annually ($95.88 a year). Choose DeleteMe for human oversight and a complex footprint; choose Incogni for lower cost and broader automated reach.
When paying for data removal actually pays off, when to do it yourself for free, and the one feature that decides whether the subscription is worth the money.
Data removal services are worth it if your home address, phone, and relatives are published on people-search sites and your time is worth more than the roughly 20 hours a thorough manual opt-out takes. They cannot remove everything, and listings reappear, so the real value is the ongoing monitoring and re-filing, not a one-time cleanup. For a one-off, doing it yourself is free.
To remove your phone number from the internet, opt out of the people-search sites that publish it, delete it from caller-ID apps like Truecaller and Hiya, ask Google to remove pages that still show it, and add it to the National Do Not Call registry. Re-check every couple of months, because numbers reappear as brokers ingest new records.
Real 2026 numbers for DeleteMe, Incogni, and Optery, what family plans add, the free DIY route, and the single line item that actually justifies the yearly fee.
Data removal costs roughly $0 to $180 a year. Doing it yourself is free but takes about 20 hours across the major brokers. Paid services run from Incogni at $95.88 a year to DeleteMe at $129 a year for one person, with family plans and premium tiers reaching a few hundred. The recurring monitoring, not the first cleanup, is what the fee buys.
Opt-out guides, broker by broker
Step-by-step instructions for the six brokers that publish most of what a stranger finds when they
search your name.