# We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

**URL:** https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/we-caught-companies-making-it-harder-to-delete-your-personal-data-online/30022
**Category:** News
**Tags:** article
**Created:** 2025-08-13T18:55:55Z
**Posts:** 4

## Post 1 by @KevPham — 2025-08-13T18:55:55Z

> **[We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online –...](https://themarkup.org/privacy/2025/08/12/we-caught-companies-making-it-harder-to-delete-your-data)**
>
> Dozens of companies are hiding how you can delete your personal data, The Markup and CalMatters found. After our reporters reached out for comment, multiple companies have stopped the practice.

Yikes. Data brokers have been caught hiding deletion instructions from search engine results. Seems like they actively know what they’re doing is scummy.

> More than 30 of the companies, which collect and sell consumers’ personal information, hid their deletion instructions from Google, according to a review by The Markup and CalMatters of hundreds of broker websites. This creates one more obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data.
> 
> Many of the pages containing the instructions, listed in an official state registry, use code [to tell search engines](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag) to [remove the page entirely](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing) from search results. Popular tools like [Google](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag) and [Bing](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/block-urls-from-bing-264e560a) respect the code by excluding pages when responding to users.

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## Post 2 by @Tech_User_Station — 2025-08-14T20:24:40Z

This seems to be a trend. I came across another similar [study](https://cyberscoop.com/data-brokers-california-ccpa-non-compliance-privacy/) from the University of California, Irvine last month.

> Of the 543 companies contacted, 40% failed to respond in any way, showing “rampant non-compliance” among the registered brokers.

Daniel’s law currently covers judges & law enforcement. It carries a fine of $1000 per violation for failing to remove the subject’s PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in a timely manner. If Daniel’s law extends to everyone, it could improve privacy compliance.

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## Post 3 by @donutfreak — 2025-08-14T22:24:10Z

Scale: It’s probably a full time job trying to delete your own data by sending out thousands of requests and follow ups. Services are probably better to handle this for us.

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## Post 4 by @Tech_User_Station — 2025-08-28T17:59:39Z

I work for one of those services, Privacy Bee. We have the widest coverage (800+ brokers) but if more and more of these data brokers take too long or blatantly refuse to delete our users’ PII (Personally Identifiable Information) it becomes harder to justify our subscription price to customers. GoButler (a rogue data broker) was finally taken offline after many formal complaints to state bodies and their service provider. Daniel’s law for everyone could help increase compliance rates.