- DeleteMe is a privacy service that claims
to save you hour of time and effort
erasing your personal data
so that it can't be found on the internet.
But how does it accomplish this?
Does it really work?
And most importantly, is it worth that high annual fee?
Well, I've been testing the service
for more than a month now,
and this is what I've learned.
(electric buzz)
Welcome to All Things Secured.
My name's Josh, and I'm gonna start by showing you
my initial setup process,
The information that I had to give to DeleteMe
and that first report I received from DeleteMe.
But make sure you stick around to the end
where I'll explain some of the pros and cons
of using this kind of privacy service.
Okay. One of the first things that you'll see
when you click Join Me on the DeleteMe website
is that they have three different options.
Now it makes sense that if you're a married couple,
that you would wanna have two people,
and if you wanna save a little bit extra money,
you can do two years.
But since this is a business expense,
I'm just gonna do one person for one year
to show you and myself what this is like.
So I'm putting in my email address,
you've got your billing information,
all of this is just the regular stuff
that you need to provide
in order to purchase any type of online service.
And again, if you wanted to,
you could switch to the two year plan,
pay $50 or add a family member,
if you needed too, as well.
So I'm gonna skip through here
and let's just go ahead and make sure
that the payment gets finished.
Great! The payment went through,
and now I'm on my DeleteMe dashboard.
This is where I have to go in and add
all of my information.
And there's a lot of information,
so it may feel uncomfortable when you're first doing it,
but let me just show you everything that I had to do.
So obviously, I'm putting in my name,
you wanna put in alternate names if you have that,
maiden names, names that you went by before,
or even common misspellings of your name,
and then of course you wanna add in your birthday
because that's another piece of information
that's often used to identify you.
You can put in your gender, male, female,
or otherwise, if you want to,
and then of course, the emails that you use,
your work email, your personal email.
You wanna put as many of those in as you can.
Same with your phone numbers.
Even past phone numbers so that way
they can find the information
that might be floating anywhere on the internet.
Okay. The next step is moving into our addresses.
Now this will possibly be difficult for those of you
who just have moved around a lot,
or very easy for those of you who have stayed
in the one spot for decades,
but add as many of the addresses as you can,
going back a couple decades, if you can.
So for me, I even put in addresses before I got married
and just making sure that I had all of that information
that they could use to search and find me anywhere I was.
So add all those and then click Next.
Okay. What's great is that this next step
is actually really nice because it used to be
that they would ask you to upload
a copy of your driver's license
or some sort of ID, your passport,
in order to use that when the site's asked
to verify in order to remove your information.
Instead, now you can just ask them
to send that request to your email address
so you don't, I never had to upload
any of my documents anywhere.
The final thing that we're doing here
is we are adding in any relatives
to make sure that they can find that as well.
And now here we are.
Now we're on the dashboard.
I'll be honest.
One of the things that I was expecting to happen
was that I would see like,
"okay, and now we're starting to search through,"
and some sort of automated process,
but that's not what happens with DeleteMe
because a lot of this is done manually.
The searching is often done manually
and the removal is done manually.
And that's one of the reasons why
this service tends to be a little more expensive
than I would think that it should be.
And that's also why it's something
that has to be continually done on a quarterly basis
for as long as you wanna keep your information offline.
So I am waiting.
I had to wait actually for about seven days
before that first report came to my email,
and then I was able to review and look over it.
So let's go ahead and take a look at this first report.
This first report, like I said,
came in about seven days after I signed up.
And it's personalized to me.
You can see here that they reviewed over 2,000 records.
They had 21 total records removed off
of eight different data brokers,
and 130 pieces of information that they had found.
Now those numbers really honestly mean nothing to me.
What really means something to me is the fact
that I saved about six and a half hours of searching online,
which I totally believe that to be true,
and about four hours of going through
and removing that information online.
So almost a total of more than 10 hours.
When you multiply that by four, that's 40 hours saved.
Definitely worth the $130 sign up fee, annual fee,
that I had to do.
So, I mean, if you look at it from that perspective,
it makes a little bit more sense
even if there is a bit of sticker shock
when you're first looking at it,
at least there was for me.
So let's look through the findings.
When you go through and if you see a green clean,
that means they found none of my information on there,
whereas if there is something like here,
you see on NeighborWho, they found my name,
my age, my past address, relative,
spouse name, marital status,
all of that information.
And they requested that it be removed.
And that's gonna probably take about 10 days
for them to do that.
10 days is actually not a bad time
when you compare it to something like this one on the right,
Free Phone Tracer, that takes up to six weeks.
And if you're thinking to yourself,
"That's ridiculous. Why would it take six weeks?"
That's a good question.
It should not take six weeks.
And that's part of what makes this whole industry,
this data broker industry, just shady as all get out
because it shouldn't require six weeks
to remove the data that you request for them to remove.
Anyway, you can look through here.
I had already gone through and remove my data from Spokeo,
so I'm glad to know that it's not there anymore.
BeenVerified, People Smart had some of my information
as did Nuwber, these places.
The thing is, is these kind of data brokers,
they pop up and go away all the time.
And that's why they've constantly
need to be searching for new places.
And if you find a place where your data has been found,
like I told you earlier, I did find a place online.
I was able to submit that to them
and they were able to take it down.
So you get through and you get to the end,
and basically all I need to know is that
in February of 2022, we're gonna go
through this whole process again.
And they're gonna look at those same places.
They're gonna check and make sure
that the places that they requested the data removal
has actually been removed,
and they're gonna follow up with them on that.
All of this takes time and it takes effort
and I love the fact that DeleteMe
just takes care of all of that.
And all I'm gonna have to worry about
is I'm just gonna be getting an email
once a quarter that says, here is your report.
Here's all the information that we've taken away.
All right, now let's quickly talk about
the pros and cons of using a service like DeleteMe.
First on the pro side,
I tried doing this data removal request manually
on a couple of these different sites,
and I can confirm that it is a time-consuming headache.
So the service definitely does a good job
of making that whole process easier.
It also works.
As you saw in my initial report,
there were a number of sites that had
my personal information that are now removing it
or have already removed it.
And finally, I like being assigned
a personal privacy advisor.
If I find my personal information somewhere,
which I did at some point,
I can simply submit the website to them.
And they'll not only remove the information,
they'll also continue to monitor it
to make sure that it stays off the site.
Of course, since this isn't an entirely automated process,
they do have people working on this manually,
that means that DeleteMe ends up
costing a little bit more than I would like.
Not to mention the weird way that they market their pricing.
I mean, if you think about it,
it's a quarterly service
that's being marketed with a monthly price tag,
but you're only given the option to pay on an annual basis.
You see what I mean?
There's also that issue of trust.
In order for them to find and remove your information,
you have to give them all of that information
in the first place.
Granted, I never gave over my ID number,
my social security number,
or any banking information for them to store and search,
but it still requires a high degree of trust
in the company itself.
Lastly, it seems important to note
that this isn't a quick fix solution.
It took seven days to get my report
and then another week or two for all of those sites
to remove my information.
So if you're in any kind of urgent situation
where you're being tracked or bullied,
don't expect DeleteMe to provide immediate relief.
So overall, I'm really happy with my experience.
Could I've manually opted out of all these services myself?
Probably. Yes.
But I value my time almost as much as I value my privacy.
So for me, it was worth the expense.
In the end, it feels like a luxury service
for those who either fear their personal information
falling into the wrong hands
or they have the disposable income to do something about it.
And as somebody who talks about personal privacy
and security on this channel,
I feel like I definitely fall
at least in that former category.
If you decide to give DeleteMe a try,
use my affiliate link in the description
or the comments below. Thanks.