The Best Personal Data Removal Services for 2025

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

PCMag has helped you pick the best antivirus ever since the software for it existed. We also stay on top of new types of protection, like personal data removal services that prevent data brokers from selling your personal information. These services scour the many people search and data broker websites for your personal data and act as your proxy for requesting the removal of your data. We consider a variety of criteria in our evaluations, including price, ease of use, and the number of data aggregators each can handle, and we test their protective abilities directly. Based on our analysis, Optery and Privacy Bee are our Editors’ Choice winners, but we have a collection of other services for your consideration. Read on for our top picks and tips to choose the service that suits your needs.

Who Is Gathering Your Personal Data?

Two main types of sites collect your personal data: people search sites and data brokers. Data brokers scrape your personal data across the web, package it into a profile, and sell it to anyone buying. Mostly, their customers are advertisers who use your info for targeted browser ads, email spam, or even snail-mail campaigns. But shady characters prepping for identity theft can also purchase these profiles.

However, people search sites bill themselves as friendly, helpful services. They’ll reconnect you with old friends or background-check a potential date. What’s wrong with that?

If you try a free lookup on one of these sites, you’ll find some sketchy features. Typically, you’ll see a continuous display of activity, complete with a progress bar that tells you what's supposedly happening in the background: Now we’re searching for matching addresses, now we're checking court filings, and now we're riffling through property records, each with a progress bar. Often, the process will stop to ask you for more information. It’s all smoke and mirrors; the actual search happens instantly.

In the end, you get a few hits that might be your target, showing partial information like name, state, and age. Want more details? Enter your email and pay a fee. Since you’ve already interacted with the site for five minutes or more, you may feel spending a few bucks is just protecting your time investment.

But think. Now, the search site has your information, your name, and your email at least. It also has the credit card you used for payment. If this seems fine to you, you probably don’t need a personal data removal service. But if you’re at all concerned with your privacy, don’t fall for the hook. Consider engaging a service to remove your data from these sketchy sites.

How Many Data Brokers Have Your Personal Data?

Selling personal profiles is a lucrative business. There are hundreds of sites doing it, more every day. One way to select a removal service is to look for the one that handles cleaning up the most such sites. With almost 900 sites primed for automated removal, Privacy Bee is a clear winner on that basis. If you pay for its highest-priced tier, Optery has the next highest count, with more than 600 sites.

Kanary offers automated removal on more than 200 sites, while Incogni and Mozilla Monitor Plus come in a bit under 200. Kanary does track another 100 sites but leaves you, the user, to handle opting out from those. IDX Complete manages data cleanup on 137 sites as of this writing, while DeleteMe deals with just 72. At the bottom is Aura’s list of 28 popular data brokers—personal data removal isn’t Aura’s main focus.

How Much Do Personal Data Removal Services Cost?

Sure, you want your data cleared from as many sites as possible, but you don’t want to break the bank to get that job done. Price is also relevant, and Incogni costs significantly less than the rest—less than $90 per year. Years ago, DeleteMe seemed expensive, justifying its $129 yearly fee based on the need for human intervention in many removals. At present, Mozilla Monitor Plus, at $107.88 per year, has the next-lowest price after Incogni. Costing $129 per year, DeleteMe comes next.

At the other end of the spectrum is IDX Complete, which costs a whopping $355.32 per year. To be fair, IDX Complete is a full suite of security and privacy components, including a complete identity theft monitoring and remediation system. Aura also combines personal data removal with identity theft protection and adds antivirus. It costs less, $144 per year, but as noted, it covers the fewest data aggregator sites.

Pricing Optery is less simple, as it offers multiple tiers. At the Ultimate tier, Optery costs $249 per year and automates removal on all 600+ sites it checks. Choosing the Extended tier drops the price to $149 and the automated cleanup to 240-plus sites; you’re on the hook for DIY removal from the rest. At the Core tier, Optery only takes care of cleanup on 85 sites, and it charges $39 per year but imposes limits on the data it checks.

Privacy Bee and Kanary cost less than Optery’s Ultimate tier but more than its Extended tier. Specifically, you pay $197 per year for Privacy Bee and $179.88 for Kanary.

Can You Do Personal Data Removal Yourself for Free?

There is one other price worth mentioning, and that’s zero. DeleteMe, Kanary, Mozilla, Optery, and Privacy Bee let you use their private data scan results without any charge. Mozilla simply points you at your found profiles, leaving you to figure out the removal process. The others supply site-specific DIY instructions for managing removal requests yourself. If you have time to do the job, you can save hundreds of dollars.

Before you commit to that project, you may want to consider just how long it might take. One test scan of a PCMag author reported over 800 items of personal data found on more than 90 websites. The process for getting removed from a site varies, ranging from a simple form to a complicated rigmarole requiring scanned documents. Supposing a manual removal averages five minutes, dealing with those 90 sites would take nearly eight hours of your valuable time.

Going Beyond Data Brokers and People Search Sites

All the services gathered here aim to remove your personal data from people search sites, data brokers, and other online data aggregators. Some take the hunt for your data to deeper levels. Privacy Bee finds and reports on data breaches that have exposed your data, for example. IDX Complete and Aura also monitor breaches as part of their identity protection. And data breach reporting was the original purpose of Mozilla Monitor.

Privacy Bee’s list of items for consideration includes a few dozen described as industry opt-outs, such as getting on the Do Not Call registry and opting out of snail-mail spam. It also reports when it finds your data in iffy search results and public social media posts.

There’s always the chance you’ll run across your data on a site not covered by your personal data removal service. Users at Optery’s top tier can submit custom removal requests for such sites, 40 per year. You may also want to remove your data from other sites before they can accidentally or deliberately release that data. DeleteMe lists almost 700 sites from which it can clear your data, and you can make your own custom removal requests. Privacy Bee’s similar list goes beyond 160,000. With Privacy Bee, you can flag your relationship with such sites as trusted or otherwise and wipe your data from those you don’t trust.

Are Personal Data Removal Services Safe to Use?

If you want to enlist a service to wrest your personal data from the clutches of data aggregator sites, you necessarily give that service its own access to your sensitive personal information. Otherwise, how would it know what to remove? That does conceivably open a security hole. Anyone who gains access to your account with the service will own all the data you’ve asked it to protect.

Almost all the services listed here use password-based authentication to prevent misuse of the data you share with them. Privacy Bee is an exception in that it relies on the security of your email account. At each login, you receive an emailed code for authentication. Of course, if your email account is compromised, your problems are much bigger than merely exposing a few elements of private data.

Password protection fails if a malefactor steals or guesses your password. Multi-factor authentication plugs that potential security gap by requiring an additional authentication factor, typically a code texted to your phone or (better) a time-sensitive value reported by an authenticator app.

DeleteMe, IDX Complete, Kanary, Mozilla, and Optery all support Google Authenticator or a compatible authenticator app. With DeleteMe, you can opt to have a code sent to your primary email address instead. As noted, Privacy Bee also uses an emailed code but lets you optionally require a second code generated by an authenticator app.

What Else Do Personal Data Removal Services Do?

You can’t fault a service for being laser-focused on its primary task. Incogni, Kanary, and Optery do their best to clear your personal data profiles from data aggregator sites and don’t attempt much beyond that. However, some of their competitors add a few privacy bonuses, and others incorporate data removal into a full suite of privacy features.

Aura and IDX Complete are primarily identity theft remediation services, with credit monitoring and white-glove remediation assistance common to that category. Both report when your personal data is exposed in a data breach, and both include VPN protection and a password manager. IDX Complete adds a browser extension to block online trackers, a social media monitor, a private search option, and more. With Aura, you get antivirus protection for your devices, including detecting malicious and fraudulent websites. Both handle personal data removal, but it’s not their primary purpose.

For many years, Abine DeleteMe focused strictly on deleting your personal data from data aggregators. More recently, it has taken the fight upstream, masking your personal data to limit what the aggregators can find. Specifically, it lets you create temporary email addresses for your interactions with websites, thereby protecting your actual email address. For an added price, you can use masked phone numbers and (coming soon) masked credit cards.

I mentioned earlier that Privacy Bee enhances its reporting of found personal profiles with industry opt-out requests and data found in public social media posts. Like IDX Complete, it includes a tracker-blocking browser extension and a private search option. It also finds data breaches that expose your data and reports on them. Finally, an unusual email analysis system lists companies you interact with and lets you mark them as trusted or not.