Aaron Marsden
Behind OptOut Shelf
About
Self-employed digital marketing consultant, Austin, 41. My day job involves helping small businesses think about how they show up online: Google searches, paid ads, that kind of thing. In early 2024, I Googled my own name and spent the next hour staring at a version of that problem I hadn't thought about before.
My home address was there. My wife's maiden name. A list of relatives going back to my grandparents, across three people-search sites I'd never interacted with. One of them had a removal request link that sent a confirmation email. That record was back three months later. Confirmed removal and permanent removal: not the same thing.
I paid for a removal subscription that week, around $130 a year. Then a second (roughly $97), because the first wasn't reaching Spokeo and WhitePages, where my address kept resurfacing. I manually opted out of about 50 more: BeenVerified, FastPeopleSearch, Radaris, PeopleFinder, and a string of smaller sites I hadn't heard of before my own name appeared there. I kept a spreadsheet: removal confirmations, 60-day re-listings, and which services' monthly reports described work they hadn't actually done (caught by cross-checking their logs against live Google searches).
18 months and a few hundred dollars in subscriptions later, that spreadsheet became this site. Not a security researcher, not a privacy lawyer, not a cybersecurity professional of any kind. Someone who paid for services, checked the results, and wrote down what happened. That's what the reviews here are based on.
Posts by Aaron Marsden
- Best Encrypted Cloud Storage for Self Employed Consultants
- How to Use DeleteMe to Remove Your Austin Business Address From Google
- Proton Mail Features for Self Employed Consultants Seeking Privacy
- Best Password Managers for Austin Small Business Owners After a Breach
- Why Personal Data Keeps Reappearing on Broker Sites After a Removal
- Best Software to Wipe Your Computer Hard Drive Before Recycling
- Best Password Managers for People Switching From Chrome and Safari
- Best Personal Data Removal Services to Protect Your Family Members
- Best Ways to Securely Erase External Hard Drives and USB Sticks
- Why RoboForm With a Yubikey is the Best Secure Password Setup
- Is Incogni Worth the Money for Automatic Data Broker Removal? (2026 Update)
- Why RoboForm is Still the Best Password Manager for Small Business Owners in 2026
- Best Proton Mail and VPN Bundle Features for Families: A 2026 Update
- How to Remove Your Texas Home Address From People Search Sites (2026 Update)
- Manual Data Broker Opt Out vs Paid Services: What Saves Time in 2026?
- Using EaseUS BitWiper to Securely Erase Your Hard Drive Before Selling (2026 Update)
- DeleteMe vs Incogni: Which Data Removal Service Actually Works Better? (2026 Update)
- I Googled My Own Name and Panicked: My First Month Trying DeleteMe
Disclosure
Some outbound links here are affiliate links, meaning I get paid a small commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I don't collect or store any data about which links you click. For more on how the editorial side handles affiliate relationships, see my Editorial Policy.