DeleteMe is a service that helps internet users clean up their digital footprint by assisting them in deleting their data from major data brokers. Users can decrease the number of personal information displayed in Google search results by removing personal information from top data-gathering firms such as Spokeo, BeenVerified, and Intelius. We examine the pricing, ease of usage, security, and more in this deleteme review.
Abine, Inc., a software company located in Boston, owns DeleteMe. Abine offers a well-known password manager, Blur, in addition to its premium DeleteMe service. Both programs are geared toward ensuring internet users’ privacy. Blur, on the other hand, is free to use and focuses on safe password management and adblocking/tracker blocking.
The initial version of DeleteMe was released in 2010. Customers who pay for DeleteMe have peace of mind knowing that their sensitive personal information isn’t lying around on servers ready to be compromised.
Even if you don’t have to worry about hacking, data aggregators may be a real hassle. Data brokers earn by selling your personal information to third parties. This implies that while your information is stored in their database, it may be shared without your knowledge or agreement.
Furthermore, some of your personal information may surface in search results online as a result of your data appearing in data aggregating websites.
This can compromise your privacy and put your personal security at risk by giving hackers access to information needed to carry out social engineering attacks (phishing). In the worst-case scenario, your information might be used to commit fraud or identity theft.
DeleteMe review: Pricing
In this Deleteme Review you or anyone who wishes to use Abine’s DeleteMe service can do so through one of three membership plans:
- For one year, a basic package allows one internet user to erase their information from data broker websites. This plan costs $10.75 per month ($129 invoiced yearly) on a monthly basis.
- Users can remove two people’s data from data broker databases for a year for $19.08 per month ($229 paid yearly).
- Finally, customers can pay $14.99 each month ($349 invoiced biennially) for two users to have their data wiped for two years.
DeleteMe is, as you can see, pretty costly. DeleteMe is not offered as a one-time purchase since keeping your data off data broker websites is an ongoing operation (requiring regular checks to determine whether your data has been re-added). Instead, anyone who is serious about having their information erased from data aggregation websites and search results must pay for the service forever.
This is a significant disadvantage of this type of service, and it means that keeping your data off data broker sites will be an ongoing cost.
What kind of data does DeleteMe remove?
Anyone who signs up for DeleteMe may anticipate their personal information to be erased from major data brokers. Their name, address, age, phone number, email address, pictures – and even photos of their house – are all removed from databases.
The screenshot below shows what you can learn about ordinary individuals by searching for them online. This is the type of entry that DeleteMe is made to remove.
Subscriber data will not surface in internet search results as a result of utilizing DeleteMe. That is unless the search results serve up information from genuine internet services where the user personally submitted the information, or when personal information emerges on news websites for whatever reason.
Removing search engine results in response to such requests will entail invoking the right to be forgotten (not currently available in the USA – but is available in the EU).
As a result, it’s important to note that DeleteMe isn’t a magic wand that will make you vanish from Google search results. Rather, it is a service that is meant to delete your data from data brokers – which has the unintended consequence of making some of your personal data disappear online – in locations where the internet user never consented to such data being shared.
In this deleteme review subscribers who choose to invest in a DeleteMe membership may expect to have their data erased from the following services (DeleteMe presently removes users from roughly 38 services):
| Company | What It’s Used For |
| Been Verified | Background Checks |
| PeopleSmart | Public Records |
| Spokeo | People Search Engine |
| PeekYou | People Search Engine |
| Addresses.com | Enterprise and Identity Verification |
| Intelius | Public Records & Phone Numbers |
| PeopleFinders | Public Records |
| Whitepages | Public Records |
| Whitpages Pro | Public Records |
| Advanced People Search | People Search Engine |
| Easy Background Checks | Background checks |
| Yellow Pages | Business & Individual listings |
| ZabaSearch | Reverse Phone Number Lookup & People Search Engine |
| People Lookup | People Search Engine |
| US Search | Background Checks, Reverse Phone lookup & Property Records |
As you can see, the data brokers listed are mostly situated in the United States. This is because DeleteMe is situated in the United States, and you are paying to have your data erased from Western data aggregating services.
As a result, our service may or may not be able to erase any data about you stored by data brokers in other countries. This is a minor flaw in DeleteMe’s service that may make it more appealing to Americans.
On the other hand, we recognize that whoever manages your DeleteMe campaign will conduct research to try to locate your data online, and if a DeleteMe agent is able to locate your data on any service where it can be deleted, every effort will be taken to do so. It’s also worth mentioning that US websites frequently save information about international citizens, so DeleteMe can be beneficial even if you don’t live in the US.
Ease of Use
In this deleteme review, you will know that it is quite simple to use Abine DeleteMe. After a user has enrolled, they must first provide all of the personal information that they want to be deleted from aggregator databases. Users are asked for information such as their name, address, date of birth, phone numbers, and any aliases or former identities they have used (maiden name, common misspellings, etc.)
Users may add as many addresses, names, emails, and phone numbers as they like, and if they miss something, they can start a new campaign after the first is completed.
Users must then upload, email, or fax a photo of their driver’s license, passport, or other state-issued ID to DeleteMe to prove that they are who they claim they are. In order to delete you from some services, DeleteMe needs this redacted version of your ID (you can conceal the photo and ID number).
Giving DeleteMe access to your sensitive personal information may appear to be contradictory to your goal of attaining privacy. However, because this is the only method for the company to erase your data, it seems sensible to offer PI to DeleteMe if you want the service to work.
Once the service obtains your information, it may start the process of requesting that data brokers delete your information from their databases. This is accomplished by requesting that your data be deleted from such services via an ‘opt-out’ request. To be honest, this is something you could accomplish on your own. As a result, you’re paying for convenience rather than a service that you can only obtain from DeleteMe.
The process of using DeleteMe
Your first campaign begins when you provide your data to DeleteMe. Subscribers can erase as much personal information as they like, and they can add more data sets as needed. This guarantees that any past addresses, or multiple addresses (if they own more than one property, for example), are deleted from data broker databases correctly. Follow this deleteme review carefully to know the complete process.
It’s important to remember that you must wait for DeleteMe to deliver you a report for an ongoing request before you can add further data to your campaign. According to the firm:
“If you forget to add any information (aliases, past addresses, etc) to your DeleteMe datasheet, you can add those at any time to your datasheet by logging into your account. If you’ve already received your first DeleteMe report (with some information missing), you can request an “ad-hoc” report from our support team to include the new information in the reporting process. Your new information will then be included in all future reports.”
As a result, you won’t be able to amend your campaign right away; instead, you’ll have to wait for the business to finish dealing with the initial request. As a result, it’s recommended to double-check that you’ve entered all of your addresses, aliases, and other data you wish to delete before pressing enter.
in this deleteme review, following the successful removal of your data, the business will check every three months to determine if data brokers have accumulated data on you again. If they have, the procedure will be repeated to guarantee that your information is removed from those databases once again.
After each removal session, all subscribers receive a full status report that specifies exactly what data was deleted and from which services. As a result, while DeleteMe claims to provide the service for a year, it really deletes your data four times. Once when you first join, and again after three, six, and nine months have passed. After then, a year will have gone by, and it will be time to renew your subscription.
It’s also worth mentioning that customers have the option of adding as many individuals as they like to their accounts. While each additional person must be paid for individually at a cost of
Privacy and Security
Being headquartered in the United States is not seen as a favorable location for a privacy service. Warrants and gag orders are common in the United States, and they allow the government to compel companies to store and give everyone’s data to government intelligence organizations in complete secrecy.
According to US law, it’s conceivable that DeleteMe has already been issued with a warrant requiring it to keep all of the information you supply. If this is the case (and there’s no way of knowing), your information might be on its way to the US government via DeleteMe.
With that out of the way, we can look at the company’s privacy policy to see what protection it offers for your personal information. The privacy policy specifies that client data will not be sold and that it will only be used by DeleteMe and its third-party providers to provide the service. According to the policy:
“Many companies profit off their users by selling their info, but we’ll never do that. We only use the data we collect about the way people use our products and our website to build better products. We’ll never share any personal data about your online activity or use it to target you individually. If you choose to sign up for our newsletters or receive emailed updates of our privacy blog, we’ll occasionally send you emails with coupons, announcements, and Abine news.”
The policy also states that:
“Some of our other services (like DeleteMe) may also require some data sharing to provide the service, such as requesting that third party websites (data brokers and information aggregators) remove or suppress your personal information from their websites. To fulfill your opt-out requests, we may have to identify listings held by data brokers, which necessarily requires sharing portions of your data with them.”
This section of the privacy policy indicates that in order for your data to be deleted, the company will need to exchange it with data broker firms. One minor risk is that data brokers may “delete or conceal” that data, according to DeleteMe. What appears to be a concern is that DeleteMe may send data to data brokers and information aggregators that they do not already hold.
In this deleteme review, you will know the privacy policy appears to indicate that some data brokers may “suspend” rather than “destroy” your information. This implies that data brokers may begin processing your data again once a specified length of time has passed (and potentially have some extra snippets of data about you gained from DeleteMe).
This is a restriction of the service since, while DeleteMe can do everything it can to get data brokers to erase your data, it can’t promise that they will. It’s conceivable that data brokers will decide to put your data on hold.
As a result, there are a few key factors to consider before deciding whether or not to utilize DeleteMe: Whether or not you are able to afford it. Whether or not you have faith in the US government (and you can abide by the possibility that your data may be intercepted by US authorities). And whether you trust data broker businesses to destroy your data permanently rather than merely “suppress” it for a limited time.
Customer service of DeleteMe
Read this deleteme review you will know that using DeleteMe isn’t difficult, and there doesn’t appear to be any reason why a user would need to contact customer care to get the service up and running. It is possible to contact assistance if you are having trouble or don’t understand anything.
The website features a contact form and a support center with informative FAQs, and users may also ask questions through live chat during US business hours (Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time).
We decided to try out the contact form and were pleasantly surprised to receive answers so promptly. This implies that even if the live chat is closed, you will be able to ask questions on how to use the service.
Conclusion
When you search for a name and address online, you’ll generally get complete or partial results from data aggregator sites. Typically, these sites will redact part of the information while still indicating that the proper individual has been identified. After that, sites like Spokeo charge a fee to view the whole information for that person.
With a DeleteMe membership, these types of searches should return no results, indicating that your data is no longer for sale on any of these data broker websites. So, how well does it work?
Following our initial effort, we discovered that our data was considerably more difficult to locate. All of the data broker websites that were contacted executed DeleteMe’s request, indicating that the service significantly improved our digital footprint. It’s safe to claim that this service delivers on its promises.
There are certainly legitimate worries about the company’s US basis. You must personally supply your personal data to DeleteMe in order for it to execute its service, which means the company is obtaining a lot of sensitive information about you that it might possibly disclose to the US government.
We’d like DeleteMe to be situated in Switzerland or the Netherlands, where customer data is more protected and there’s less risk of data being covertly gathered by authorities without consumers’ knowledge. This is, however, a small nitpick that will only affect those who use particularly heightened threat models.
It’s also true that DeleteMe offers a service that customers may do on their own. And, in our opinion, the greatest method to safeguard your digital privacy is to limit who gets access to it. As a result, doing it yourself is most likely the preferable alternative.
Of course, contacting data brokers and requesting that they erase your data may be a time-consuming and frustrating procedure. As a result, it is reasonable if you would rather pay DeleteMe.
Paying $10.75 per month can give exceptional value for money for some internet users, particularly if you are a US resident whose data has been identified by a big number of online data brokers. I hope this deleteme review was helpful for you.
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