DeleteMe vs Incogni: My Tracking Notes After a Few Months of Scrubbing My Data

My Incogni dashboard shows more completed removals than pending ones now, a shift that took long enough to show up that I'd genuinely stopped watching for it. That number matters more than it sounds, because most people buy a data removal service, one of the more visible privacy tools out there, on the same assumption I used to have: that it's something you install once, like a firewall, and then forget about. I'm a digital marketing consultant in Austin who spends more hours than is healthy staring at search results, and the identity-protection habit that actually stuck for me wasn't a one-time cleanup. It was watching two very different services fight the same re-listing problem, month after month, and noticing which one actually kept score.

Quick disclosure before I get further into it: the DeleteMe, Incogni, and Proton links on this page are affiliate links, and I earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. I've paid for all three myself, along with RoboForm and EaseUS BitWiper, and nothing below is a service I haven't actually run against my own name.

The Myth Behind Every "Permanent" Data Removal Claim

Here's the misconception that sells most of these subscriptions in the first place: that once a broker processes your removal request, especially under an actual privacy law, the record is gone for good. It isn't. A removal request is a single transaction, not a restraining order, and the gap between legally required to delete and actually stays deleted is where a service like this earns its price or wastes it (marketing pages love the word "complete" and I'd take it with a grain of salt every time). I've been running DeleteMe and Incogni side by side for months specifically to watch that gap, rather than just clocking which one deletes something first.

Before either subscription, I tried the free workaround: changing my business phone number, on the theory that a fresh number would mean cleaner search results going forward. It didn't work. The old number stayed attached to my name on multiple broker profiles for months after I'd stopped using it entirely, because a listing doesn't know or care that the number changed underneath it — it just sits there until someone specifically requests it removed, and even then it can resurface later.

Why a "Resolved" Ticket Doesn't Mean the Listing Is Gone

Data brokers aren't hiding some secret file on you. They're pulling from public records, property tax filings, and marketing lists that are legal to resell in the first place, which is why your personal information ends up online without you ever agreeing to it — the actual mechanics of who's re-scraping what is its own long answer, one I'll leave for another piece. What matters here is that a CCPA-style request is a legal lever you pull once. It doesn't stop a different data feed at the same company from re-adding your address next quarter. Incogni leans hardest into that lever: hand over your information, and it fires off requests under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and similar laws on a recurring schedule, almost entirely automated.

I also worked the fully manual route for a while before paying for anything, submitting opt-out forms broker by broker from a list of the usual suspects, until enough of them turned out to already be sitting in DeleteMe's queue that doing it by hand was just wasted effort. Months into running both services, a reader named Pamela Reeves emailed me a version of this same problem that stuck with me. She'd found her late mother's address still listed under her own profile on three separate broker sites, two full years after she'd personally submitted removal requests to all three. That's the myth collapsing in real time: "resolved" in a dashboard usually means the specific listing at that specific URL went dark, not that the underlying record vanished from wherever the broker actually stores it, and whether something has genuinely dropped out of a Google search is a different question entirely from whether the broker's own database still has you filed away somewhere. Pamela's caught more than one error in my own broker-coverage notes since that email, so I take her read on this seriously.

What Else Is Actually in My Privacy Stack?

RoboForm and EaseUS BitWiper both live in my stack, but neither one has anything to do with data brokers, which is worth saying plainly since RoboForm and EaseUS BitWiper come up in the same breath as removal services often enough to blur together. RoboForm manages the passwords, which matters because reused credentials are their own kind of re-listing risk once one breached site hands them to another — the Yubikey clipped to my monitor stand is there for that reason, not for show. EaseUS BitWiper solves a narrower, physical problem: wiping a drive clean before a laptop gets sold or donated, which is a different erasure question from whether an SSD needs a different wipe method than an old spinning hard drive (it does, and it's worth knowing before trusting a quick format on either one). A VPN, for what it's worth, solves yet another separate problem entirely — it protects what you're sending over a network right now, not a listing a broker published years before you ever installed it.

DeleteMe and Incogni Are Betting on Different Fixes

DeleteMe runs the opposite bet from Incogni: actual people cross-checking the messier listings that automated scripts tend to skim past, layered on top of their own automated sweeps. That manual layer takes longer to spin up (the first full pass runs about two weeks rather than firing instantly), but it's also why their reports tend to catch the gap between legally resolved and actually gone instead of just showing a green checkmark. The whiteboard on the back of my office door, covered in colored dot stickers for every broker still in progress, hasn't been fully green in months, and that says less about either service failing than about how this actually works.

The clearest example was a listing Incogni had marked resolved after a broker acknowledged the deletion request, which turned out to have been quietly re-scraped from a property record and re-posted under a slightly different URL. DeleteMe's next quarterly report flagged it as a fresh exposure instead of treating the old case as closed, because part of what a human reviewer catches is a site restructuring itself — exactly the kind of thing dark patterns on broker sites are built to slip past. It's the difference between DeleteMe treating a resolved case as something that might reopen and a dashboard that treats resolved as final.

My coworking neighbor Gemma Tull, who found her own new neighborhood listed on a broker profile before she'd told most people she'd moved, keeps a running note of which services send the pushiest "please re-verify your information" emails after a removal supposedly finished. She mentioned it to me while we were both walking a stretch of the Barton Creek Greenbelt on a lunch break, and Incogni was apparently near the top of her list that particular month. Read into that what you want, but it tracks with what I've seen — a system that fires cleanly going in doesn't always notice on the way back out.

Why This Matters More When Clients Can Google You

If you're a consultant like me, the professional angle is its own reason to care. Keeping a business inbox on a custom domain through Proton Mail keeps client correspondence separate from my personal accounts, and Proton's bundle runs on a zero-access encryption model I won't unpack here except to say it's a genuinely different promise than a free webmail account makes. None of that stops a broker from linking your business email to your home address anyway, which is exactly the gap these removal services exist to close. And if a service you rely on ever does get breached, locking down accounts afterward is its own separate checklist, one that has little overlap with anything a broker removal subscription touches.

Coverage, Households, and What Each Plan Actually Protects

Coverage numbers are their own argument, worth a full comparison on their own rather than a paragraph here, and there's a longer reference rundown of which broker sites matter most and what each one actually publishes if you want to go down that road. The short version: Incogni advertises a broader broker list, while DeleteMe concentrates on the smaller set of sites that tend to actually surface on the first page of a Google search for your name. Cleaning every corner of the attic isn't the same job as making sure the front porch looks right for guests, and for most people worried about a client or a stranger finding them, the porch is what counts.

Household size changes the math too. DeleteMe's family plan covers up to four people, which is what made it worth it once I added my partner's name to the account instead of buying two separate subscriptions. Incogni doesn't offer a family tier as of my last check, so multi-person households end up paying per seat. RoboForm's family plan stretches further, covering up to five users, and switching to it is also what finally got my partner off saving passwords straight in the browser and onto an actual dedicated vault, which is a meaningfully different security model than most people assume it is. There's a printed timeline of every broker re-appearance taped up on the wall next to my desk at this point, and it's longer than I'd like, but shorter than it would be without either service running.

DeleteMe also tends to cut down marketing calls more noticeably over time, which tracks once you consider that broker listings are frequently the raw material telemarketing lists get built from in the first place — pull your address and number out of enough of those lists and the calls taper off on their own. I still wipe old hardware properly before it leaves the house, but that only protects data I currently control, and if you're treating this as a full footprint audit rather than chasing one broker at a time, that's its own methodology worth mapping out separately. Old hardware wiping does nothing about a record a broker already sold five years ago, which is the whole reason a subscription like this exists: you're paying to cancel subscriptions to your own information that you never signed up for.

So Which One Should You Actually Use?

If you want the cheaper option that covers the basics and don't mind occasionally double-checking a listing yourself, Incogni is a reasonable choice. The dashboard is clean and the automation is genuinely fast on the first pass, I'll give them that. But if the goal is catching the "zombie" listings that quietly crawl back after being marked resolved, DeleteMe's slower, more manual approach is the one built for that job. Their quarterly reports are the closest thing I've found to real evidence that a broker profile is actually gone rather than just currently invisible.

That's the whole point of coming back to the myth from the start: assuming a removal request is a one-and-done event is exactly what let Pamela's mother's address sit there for two years without anyone catching it. Start with DeleteMe if catching a re-listing before it snowballs matters more to you than the lower price tag on the alternative.