You may already pay for data removal. Here’s what your service probably missed.
If you use DeleteMe, Incogni, or a similar service, you’ve taken a sensible step toward reclaiming your privacy. But there’s a reasonable chance dozens of your personal profiles are still sitting online—findable by anyone who searches your name. Not because removals weren’t submitted, but because those services never found the profiles in the first place.
That’s the part of data removal nobody talks about enough: before anything can be removed, it has to be found. And finding exposed data across hundreds of broker sites, each with different formats, anti-scraping defences, and naming variations, is a genuinely hard technical problem. Most services treat it as a simple lookup. Optery built a patented search engine around it.
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A search problem masquerading as a compliance problem
Optery is part search engine, part automated removal platform. Its scanning technology uses advanced matching heuristics, recursive discovery from exposed profiles, and anti-bot evasion techniques to surface data that conventional scans routinely miss. On average, Optery identifies around 100 exposed profiles per person—40 to 50 more than competing services typically find.
That gap isn’t theoretical. TechCrunch documented it directly, reporting that Optery found nearly 50 additional exposed profiles for a journalist beyond what DeleteMe had already removed. Those weren’t obscure profiles on fringe sites. They were live, searchable, and accessible to anyone.
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Run the free scan—then judge for yourself
Optery’s free scan requires only basic details: your name, city, state, and birth year. In return, you get a full Exposure Report showing exactly where your information appears, with screenshots. No commitment required. If your current service has the situation covered, the scan will confirm it. If it hasn’t, you’ll see precisely what was left behind.
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What makes this particularly useful is that Optery doesn’t ask you to take its word for anything, like other services sometimes do. Its Exposure and Removal Reports include before-and-after screenshots for each site—documented proof of where your data was found and confirmation that it was taken down. That level of transparency is rare in an industry where most services tell you removals happened without showing you the evidence.
Why the gap keeps growing
Data brokers don’t remove a profile and consider the matter closed. They continuously re-aggregate information from new sources, which means data that was removed can quietly reappear weeks or months later. Optery runs continuous monthly sweeps to catch re-exposure automatically and combines AI-driven automation with human-assisted requests for brokers that resist standard opt-out processes.
For individuals and families, that means ongoing protection rather than a one-time clean-up. For businesses, the stakes are higher still—exposed employee home addresses and contact details create real security vulnerabilities, particularly for executives and public-facing staff. Optery for Business extends the same scanning and removal infrastructure across an employee population, closing gaps that multiply quickly at scale.
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It’s time to see if your data-removal service is cutting it
Personal data removal only works if the scan is thorough enough to find what needs removing. If you’re already paying for a service and haven’t verified what it’s actually found, it’s worth spending a few minutes with Optery’s free scan to find out. The results might be reassuring. Or they might not be.