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.
LifeLock now includes Automatic Data Broker Removal on Core, Advanced and Total, from $124.99 a year. Norton's own support document calls it a lighter version that covers "a smaller set" of brokers, and neither brand publishes how many. Prices, what it skips, and what to buy instead.
LifeLock includes Automatic Data Broker Removal on all three current plans: LifeLock Core at $124.99 a year ($12.49 monthly), Advanced at $199.99 and Total at $349.99, checked 10 September 2026. Norton's support documentation identifies the feature as Privacy Monitor Assistant Lite, "a lighter, mostly automatic version" that "automatically sends removal requests for a smaller set of supported data broker sites" about every 90 days, without agent handling of brokers that need manual steps. Neither LifeLock nor Norton publishes how many brokers that set contains. That makes LifeLock a good buy for identity theft reimbursement and credit alerts, and a weak buy if removal is the goal: Incogni Standard covers 420+ brokers for $95.88 a year and Optery Core covers 405+ sites for $39.00.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is $39.99 for the first year and renews at $79.99, and none of its five features files a removal request. Bitdefender's own FAQ says you act to remove the data it finds. What it is good at, and what to buy instead if you want takedowns.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection costs $39.99 for the first year against a $79.99 list price, and it is a monitoring service rather than a data removal service. All five features Bitdefender publishes for it are monitoring or advice: Data Breach Detection, Digital Footprint Visualization, Real Time Breach Notification, an Identity Protection Score and security advice. None of them submits an opt-out request to a data broker. Bitdefender confirms this in its official product FAQ, which says the source of each piece of information is listed "so you can tell where it came from and also act to remove it if you are interested". It is good value for breach and dark web monitoring, and poor value if your goal is getting your name and address off people-search sites, because Optery charges $39.00 for the same first year and actually files removals across 405 or more sites. Checked 9 September 2026.
McAfee's own plan comparison says Personal Data Cleanup is "Scans only" on the tier it recommends most. Removal starts one plan higher, at $89.99 for the first year and $199.99 on renewal, and McAfee publishes neither a broker count nor a list.
McAfee Personal Data Cleanup only removes your data on McAfee+ Advanced and Ultimate. On McAfee+ Premium, the plan McAfee marks as its top recommendation, the feature is listed in McAfee's own plan comparison as "Scans only": it finds your listings on data broker sites and you file every opt-out yourself. Checked 6 September 2026, McAfee+ Premium is $49.99 for the first year and $149.99 on renewal, while McAfee+ Advanced, the cheapest plan that actually submits removal requests, is $89.99 for the first year and $199.99 on renewal. The automatic rescan every three months is also limited to the plans that include full-service removal. McAfee publishes no count of the data broker sites it monitors and no itemized list, which is weaker disclosure than Norton, EasyOptOuts, Optery, OneRep, Privacy Bee or DeleteMe.
ReputationDefender does not publish a price on any page of its own website, and the estimates in circulation span three orders of magnitude. Here is what we could verify instead: who owns it, what an independent test measured, and what the services that do print their prices charge.
ReputationDefender publishes no price anywhere on its own website. We rendered four of its pages on 5 September 2026, including the homepage, the personal information removal page, the privacy page and VIP services, and found no dollar figure on any of them, no pricing link in the navigation, and a 404 at reputationdefender.com/pricing. The purchase is quote-driven and sold by phone, with a different call-tracking number on each page. Third-party estimates in circulation run from about $99 a year for basic broker removal to $25,000 a year for top managed reputation tiers, a spread wide enough to be useless. The figure that should drive the decision is public: Consumer Reports Advocacy tested seven data removal services on 8 August 2024 and measured ReputationDefender at 6 percent of profiles removed after four months, second worst of the seven, against Optery at 68 percent for $39 a year and EasyOptOuts at 65 percent for $19.99.
One of these costs $19.99 a year, one costs $95.88, and one costs $96.00 for less coverage than the $19.99 option advertises. The gap is not quality. It is how often each one rescans, who files the removals, and how much of the advertised roster your plan actually reaches.
EasyOptOuts is the cheapest at $19.99 a year for 200+ people-search sites, and it carries a 150-day money-back guarantee against the 30 days Incogni and Privacy Bee both offer. The tradeoff is cadence: EasyOptOuts rescans about every four months, three times a year, while Incogni and Privacy Bee monitor continuously. Incogni Standard is $95.88 a year for 420+ brokers on every plan with no coverage gating, and Incogni Family covers up to five people at $38.38 each. Privacy Bee is the one to read carefully: its headline 1,132 brokers applies to Pro at $192.00 and Signature, while Essentials at $96.00 covers 517 people-search sites, or 46 percent of the advertised number, and cannot take down custom sites at all. Buy EasyOptOuts for the people-search layer on a budget, Incogni for continuous monitoring on one uncomplicated plan, and Privacy Bee Pro if the advertising and data-enrichment layer is your actual concern.
These three land on every shortlist and the roundups almost never put the rate cards next to each other. Do that and the answer is simpler than the star ratings suggest, because one of the three headline coverage numbers only applies to the tiers most buyers skip.
For a household OneRep is cheapest by a wide margin: OneRep Family covers six people for $180.00 a year, which is $30.00 per person, against $38.38 on Incogni Family and $62.38 on DeleteMe's cheapest household seat, which needs four people on a two-year term paid as one $499.00 charge. For one person Incogni Standard is the pick at $95.88 a year for 420+ sites, marginally cheaper than OneRep Individual at $99.96 and covering more per plan; DeleteMe is the most expensive at $129.00 and the only one of the three with no month-to-month option at any tier. The coverage figures are not comparable: OneRep advertises 877 data brokers but that applies only to its two Pro plans, while the Individual and Family plans cover 318 public people-search sites, or 36 percent of the advertised number. DeleteMe is the only one of the three that assigns a named human privacy expert on its entry plan, and OneRep is the only one with a free trial.
These two are listed together in every roundup and are not competing for the same buyer. One claims more data brokers than anyone in the category for less than DeleteMe charges; the other sells the most expensive individual seat in it, and has a reason.
Privacy Bee is much cheaper: its Essentials plan is about $96 a year and Pro about $192, against $250 a year for Kanary Core and $500 for Kanary Advanced. Privacy Bee also claims far broader coverage, at 1,132 data brokers on Pro against DeleteMe's 986, itemized publicly across people-search, advertising, list broker and data enrichment categories. Kanary is not really selling the same product: its Advanced tier is the only plan in the category that names AI and LLM sources as a covered surface, and it adds attorney general escalation, address confidentiality enrollment and daily scanning, which matter when you are managing an actual threat rather than general exposure. Kanary Core at $250 is the most expensive entry-level individual seat in the category, six times Optery Core at $39. Both vendors have very thin independent review bases: Privacy Bee holds 4.0 out of 5 across just 13 Trustpilot reviews.
This is the only matchup in the category where both vendors put a human privacy agent on the account, which makes it the one comparison where you are pricing like against like. Twenty dollars separates them for one person, and four hundred for a family.
For one person with a human privacy agent on the account, DeleteMe is cheaper: $129.00 a year against $149.00 for Optery Extended, a gap of $20. Below that tier Optery wins outright, because Optery Core is $39.00 a year or $3.99 a month and Optery also runs a genuinely free Basic tier, while DeleteMe sells no free tier, no free trial and no month-to-month plan at any price. For a family the answer flips hard back to DeleteMe: four people for two years is $499.00 billed once, or $62.38 per person per year, where four Optery Extended seats cost $596.00 every year because Optery prices strictly per person with no household discount. The real trade at the top is reporting style: DeleteMe sends a quarterly privacy report, Optery sends before-and-after screenshots roughly every 90 days.
Optery sells per person and Incogni sells per household, which flips the answer depending on how many people you cover. Every tier of both, on both billing terms, with the per-seat math done.
For one person Optery is cheaper: $39 a year on Core against $95.88 for Incogni Standard, and Optery also has a genuinely free Basic tier while Incogni has neither a free tier nor a free trial. For a household the answer reverses, because Incogni Family covers up to five people for $191.88 a year, about $38.38 each, while Optery prices every seat separately with no household discount. Optery Core is $3.99 month to month, Extended $149 a year and Ultimate $249 a year; Incogni Standard is $15.98 month to month, exactly double its $7.99 annual rate. The closest genuine matchup is Incogni Standard at $95.88 against Optery Extended at $149, where Incogni is cheaper and Optery adds a human privacy agent and before-and-after screenshots.
OneRep works, and its family plan is the cheapest per seat in the category. The reason people ask this question is the ownership, which its own chief executive has confirmed, and the partnership Mozilla spent twenty months unwinding.
OneRep is a legitimate, functioning data removal service with a five-day free trial and a thirty-day money-back guarantee, priced at about $99.96 a year for one person or $180 a year for a family plan covering up to six people. The reason buyers question it is ownership rather than delivery: in March 2024 KrebsOnSecurity reported that OneRep founder and CEO Dimitri Shelest had launched dozens of people-search services, and Shelest publicly acknowledged retaining an ownership stake in the data broker Nuwber, which he founded around 2015, while stating that Nuwber and OneRep share no information. Mozilla, which used OneRep for Monitor Plus removals, said in March 2024 it would wind down the partnership and completed that on 17 December 2025, discontinuing Monitor Plus and issuing prorated refunds.
Two of the best text blockers are already on your phone and cost nothing. Of the products that charge, one publishes its prices and one refuses to, and two of the three carriers do not filter texts at all.
The two best spam text blockers are free and already installed: Screen Unknown Senders plus Text Message Filter in the iPhone Messages app, and Spam protection in Google Messages, which Google turns on automatically. Among products that charge, Nomorobo publishes $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year for the mobile app, $59.99 a year for Nomorobo Max and $79.99 a year for up to four devices, and it includes phishing and spam text filtering. RoboKiller publishes no plan names and no prices on its own pricing page. On the carrier side only T-Mobile filters texts at the network, free since 2014. AT&T states its ActiveArmor app does not filter texts, and Verizon Call Filter, including the $3.99 Plus tier, is a call product. No blocker at any price reduces how many texts are sent to your number.
Scam Likely is T-Mobile's label, Spam Risk is AT&T's and Potential Spam is Verizon's. Here is what each one costs to act on, the free code that blocks them on T-Mobile, and why a label is not a block.
Scam Likely is the label T-Mobile puts on a suspected scam call, Spam Risk is the equivalent label AT&T uses, and Verizon splits its own into Potential Spam, Robo Caller and Potential Fraud. All three carriers label for free. Stopping the calls is a separate switch: T-Mobile customers dial #662# to turn on Scam Block, which stops Scam Likely calls at the network before the phone rings, and #632# to turn it off. Paid upgrades are $4 a month for T-Mobile ScamShield Premium, $3.99 for Verizon Call Filter Plus and $7 for AT&T ActiveArmor advanced. None of them reduce how many calls are dialed at your number.
Three of the four call blockers worth having on an Android phone cost nothing, and two of them are already installed. Here is what each one blocks, what the paid tiers charge, and the thing none of them fix.
On Android, the first call blocker is already installed. Google turns caller ID and spam protection on by default in the Phone app, and its Filter spam calls option silences flagged calls without a missed-call notification. Carrier blocking is free on top of that: Verizon Call Filter is included on standard monthly and prepaid plans, T-Mobile Scam Shield is free with a postpaid plan, and AT&T ActiveArmor includes free in-app call controls. Paid tiers start at $3.99 a month for Verizon Call Filter Plus, $7 a month for AT&T advanced mobile security, and $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year for Nomorobo. No blocker at any price reduces how many spam calls are placed to your number, because every one of them acts after the call has been dialed.
One of these two vendors publishes its prices on its own website and the other does not. Here is what each spam blocker costs, what the free layers already do, and the thing none of them fix.
Nomorobo publishes its prices openly: $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year for the mobile app, $59.99 a year for Nomorobo Max, and $79.99 a year for a family plan covering up to four devices. RoboKiller does not publish plan names or prices on its pricing page at all, so you have to start a signup to see what you would pay. Before either, the free layers already cover a lot: Apple call screening is built into iOS, and T-Mobile states that Scam ID and Scam Block are free with a postpaid plan. No blocker, paid or free, reduces how many spam calls are placed to your number, because every one of them filters calls after they are dialed.
A sudden increase in spam calls usually traces to one of six things: an application or quote form that generated a sales lead, a fresh or refreshed people-search listing carrying your number, a breach or list resale, engaging with a previous call by pressing a button, inheriting a recycled number that was already on many lists, or a seasonal campaign wave. The National Do Not Call Registry does not stop any of them, because it restricts who is allowed to call you rather than where your number is published. Cutting the volume durably means removing the listings that supply the callers, not just asking the callers to stop.
The mail preference service the advertising industry runs on itself. What the $8 actually buys, the four categories, and the mail it is structurally unable to stop.
DMAchoice is the mail preference service run by the Association of National Advertisers, the trade body for the companies sending you mail. Registering costs $8 online or $9 by mail and lasts 10 years. You choose among four categories: credit offers, catalogs, magazine offers and other mail offers. Your name goes onto a suppression file sent monthly to participating companies, which they must use to remove you before mailing. It is legitimate, and it is also voluntary: it only binds companies that choose to use the file, and it does not cover mail from companies you have done business with in the past two years, unaddressed mail, local retailers or political mail.
Most people meet LexisNexis in a denial letter. It holds a Fair Credit Reporting Act file on you that no website publishes, and you can read it free once a year.
LexisNexis is a data and analytics company whose LexisNexis Risk Solutions unit operates as a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It compiles public records and industry-contributed data into reports sold to insurers, lenders, landlords, and employers: a consumer disclosure report covering property, liens, judgments, bankruptcies, licenses, and address history, plus the C.L.U.E. databases holding up to seven years of auto and home insurance claims. Nothing is published publicly, but you have the right to read your file free once every 12 months, dispute errors in it, and freeze it at no cost.
Google runs five separate removal paths, and picking the wrong one is why most requests get denied. Here is which form handles which problem, and what none of them can do.
A Google removal request asks Google to delist a search result, not to delete the page itself. Google runs five separate paths: the Results about you dashboard for contact details, the personal information removal form for IDs, financial and medical data, the doxxing route inside that same form, the Refresh Outdated Content tool for pages already changed at the source, and the Legal Help Center for local-law claims. Choosing the wrong one is the usual reason a request is refused, and none of them touch the website publishing the information.
The companies with the most detailed file on you are the ones you have never contacted. Here is what that industry actually is, what California now forces it to disclose, and what any of it means for you.
A data broker is a company that collects personal information about people it has no direct relationship with, then sells, licenses, or shares it. The FTC defines them as companies that gather consumer information from a wide variety of sources for the purpose of reselling it. That missing relationship is the defining trait: there is no account you opened, no terms you agreed to, and no login to delete, which is why removing yourself means filing an opt-out at each company separately.
Your home address sits in two places: the county record that created it and the dozens of commercial copies. Only one of those is removable, and it is not the one people start with.
To remove your home address from the internet, opt out of the people-search sites that republish it, then request removal of any remaining results through Google's Results about you tool. County property, voter, and court records are the original source and are almost never deletable, so the realistic goal is to break the commercial copies rather than erase the record itself. Two routes force genuine removal at the source: a state Address Confidentiality Program for survivors of domestic violence, stalking, or trafficking, and Daniel's Law style statutes covering judges, police, and prosecutors.
You cannot delete a name from Google. You can delete most of the pages that make it worth searching, and the order you do it in decides whether it stays gone.
You cannot remove your name from Google search, because a name is not personal contact information and Google accepts no removal request for it. What you can remove are the pages that carry it. De-list results exposing your home address, phone, email or ID numbers through Google's Results about you tool, opt out at the people-search sites that publish them, and ask site owners to delete or noindex the rest. Do the broker opt-outs first, or the listing regenerates at a new URL your Google request never covered.
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 remove your information from the dark web, and no service can. Once data is in a breach dump it has been copied across many hosts, and nobody can compel their deletion. What works instead is making the leak worth less: change every exposed password and turn on two-factor authentication, freeze your credit at all three bureaus, and delete the data broker records that let someone tie a leaked email to your home address, phone number, and relatives.
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.