Can data removal services be trusted?

Look, I’m going to say differently than the highest commenter on this post because I think they have value in a world that values my personal data. I used incogni and so far they just seem to be knocking my data out. Last year when I was where you were, unsure if i should do this, I was turned down for a role at a company due to a (flawed) background check (I was told this was the last step remaining in the process, I was denied the role).

So, I started looking at my own personal data (and found others with same name) and found absurdly wrong info. I have a semi common last name and a very common (for my age) first, so imagine my first hit comes up with criminal records for another stupidmanager of my about age, but possibly linked to some other family members and paying more I found my social associated as “potential”. I already knew other-stupidmanager in my city and others with my name had bad debts, but damn… that criminal record was out of the park felony (other-stupidmanager is still in prison for this). And now that I’m dating women who might have kids… man what a nightmare that could have been.

Now, nearly 9 months later, my name (first and last) might show up on the first few pages of google and it’s my professional profile or articles I’ve been quoted in. My full name, doesn’t appear at all. Also notable decrease in credit card offers, I-BUYhousing postcards and even those unsolicited advert mailers.

This is not an advert for incogni, this is a justification on why I value my private information and didn’t want to spend hundreds trying to fill out every type of form to get my name clear. I picked that company because it came recommended by another person here.

I use aura, but mostly for credit safety and ease of access to freeze/unfreeze my credit report. Got it after the experian hack ordeal. They have a ton of other services, including a data mining record deletion service and a call monitoring service. I would recommend it for pretty much everything I’ve listed. It’s made my life a lot easier, put my mind at ease. I also work a job where my personal info gets put in a lot of hands I basically have no choice but to trust. So this was kind of a necessity for me. Look into aura’s cheapest plan, see if it includes the data mining removal stuff. The extra layer of security for me is worth it, no question, but the added benefits of this, for example, and the spam call blocking just seals the deal in my opinion.

Why are you doing this?

If you don’t know why you are trying to get personally identifying information off the internet then you can’t evaluate weather you should trust the third party you’re considering contracting the job to.

If you don’t know why you’re trying to get personally identifying information off the internet then you can’t even evaluate advice people give you about it.

Trusted to do their job? Personally, I think so, and would go as far as to say the main contenders are not doing anything fishy with your data.

I think the trouble comes in with the fact that they become a high-value target to hackers because of how much information they have on their customers. I'm sure that they take a lot of technical precautions to safeguard user data, but for me personally, the risk is not worth the value proposition.

It depends. DuckDuckGo recently launched it's "Privacy Pro" Plan in the US afaik (I'm EU citizen) which claims to provide such service, but it runs locally.

Maybe a non profit/co-op should be started to do this.

I 2nd the DuckDuckGo recommendation.

The way their service works is the MOST private imo. Runs locally and shares minimal data during the takedown request process.

Mozilla has one that I've heard good things about.

If you use a service and can't find your own data it probably worked more than not at all