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Given the ubiquity and lifespan of personal data that makes its way onto the internet, people are more interested now than ever in having it permanently removed.
But is removing information from the internet even possible?
And, if so, can you hire someone to remove it for you?
The short answer is Yes, you can hire someone to remove your information from the internet.
The real question, however, is whether that person will be able to actually remove it for you.
Here’s everything you need to know about hiring someone to remove your data from the web, broken down as simply as possible.
Hire someone, or do it yourself?
You may either hire someone to remove your data from the Internet, or choose to do so yourself.
Hiring someone for your data removal?
- Faster; Saving as much as 100 hours of your time.
- Easier; Every data broker has unique removal requirements.
- Cheaper; Monthly payment plans are very affordable for most people.
DIY your data removal?
- Medium to moderate learning curve.
- May take almost 100 hours (96 hours, if you spend 30 minutes with each website.)
- Procedure for removing your data varies from site to site.
- Intentionally confusing data removal requirements from site to site.
Hiring someone to do it for you will be the faster and more effective way to go about it, but removing it yourself is also an option. All things considered, you’ll most likely want to pay someone to do it.
Here’s why: The data brokers that collect and put your data online profit from selling it to whoever is willing to pay for it. You, or anyone else, can pay for a copy of the report of data they have on you. The report is pages and pages long, and each company holds a slightly differently formatted version of that report.
That company profits off of collecting that data and making it available for purchase.
What you can remove from the internet?
Data Removal companies provide a specific and valuable service to their clients.
What they do is deal with a vast and growing number of companies that aggregate (collect) and publish personal and sensitive information on people.
Though arguably not exactly ethical, this can be a lucrative business model in the same way that many of the world’s largest companies make their money: The more data they can collect on private individuals, the better they and others can then target those individuals with advertisements that are better suited to them.
That in turn leads to increased product sales for the companies who buy and profit from the collected data.
In many cases, this is done ethically.
Data brokers, however, take advantage of loopholes in legislation, and they make it rather difficult—but not impossible to remove oneself from this matrix of published personal data.
Enter data removal companies:
To deal with the growing problem that this data collection has become, a new type of company has cropped up: Data removal companies.
Here’s what data removal companies can and can not do:
What data removal companies do:
- Remove your personal information from a large and growing number of websites that currently make your data available to the highest bidder—or anyone willing to pay.
- Help you protect your privacy by clearing the internet of your information.
What data removal companies do not do:
- Remove reviews of a company from review platforms like Google and Yelp.
- Remova data from personal blogs, even if it may be private or sensitive.
In short, data removal companies are the solution to data aggregators.
Data aggregators make money by collecting and publishing personal data.
Data removers make money by getting data aggregators to remove your personal data from their databases and websites.
Some practical examples:
Finally, let’s look at some practical examples of how this applies and what it means to you:
- Sally feels uncomfortable knowing that her home addresses for the last 20 years are available for anyone to buy off of the internet. A data removal company can help her with that.
- Jason once had a run in with the law. He wasn’t convicted of anything, but an arrest still shows up on his record. Moving into a new career, he’d prefer this fact was at least harder to discover. It’d be nice if it wasn’t on page one of Google, again available to anyone who wanted to pay for it—like a potential employer. A data removal company can help him with that.
Who to hire to remove your personal information from the internet?
People who want to remove their personal information from the internet have a variety of options to choose from.
Some of the most well known data removal companies include InfoRemover.com, Optery, Reputation Defender, and OneRep.
Each of these services provide monthly plans to help people remove their personal and sensitive information from data brokers’ websites and databases.
That makes it much easier for people with questionable motives to be able to find the data in the first place.
Does data removal delete data from Google?
Valid question!
Basically, yes, proper data removal will eventually show up in the search results as seen on Google and other search engines.
Contrary to popular belief, search engines don’t actually house any of the data that they display to users.
When you Google “Best Recipe for Chicken,” what Google, Bing and other search engines are showing you is a summary of related information from across the internet.
When any part of that related information is removed from its source—which is an actual website, also on the internet—it will no longer show up as an answer to the question when later searched.
What this means to you and others who don’t want their information online is that once it is removed from the source (data brokers’ websites), it will no longer show up in Google search results, or in Bing, and other search engines.
It may take a short time before the actual search engine results change (since the indexing of other websites is not instant), but when the website that originally housed that bad content is newly scanned by a search engine, the engine will notice the page or result that once appeared is now deleted.
And the search engine will no longer display that data to people “Googling” for it.
Instead, it will return other information, usually that is less sensitive.
