One Independent Test
Opting out works. It just does not work the way it is sold to you. There is one independent test of this, and what it measured should change what you expect before you spend a dollar or an evening on it.
Consumer Reports tested paid removal services against 13 people-search sites, with a study sample of 32 volunteers (n=32). Of 332 profiles found on the paid arm, 117 came off within four months. 35 percent. The published verdict was, quote, largely ineffective.
Doing it yourself did better, and did it faster. In the manual arm, 4 participants and 47 profiles, 33 profiles, 70 percent, were gone inside one week. The paid services cleared 26 percent in that same first week. No service is named here and none is recommended.
A Ceiling, Not a Floor
And every participant still appeared somewhere on those 13 sites at one week, at one month, and at four months (n=32). Consumer Reports also flags its own limit: it did not test whether deleted profiles came back. So 35 percent is a ceiling on durable removal, not a floor.
File It Yourself
Expect a Partial Result
Then Expect a Leak
One Request, Reaching One State
California built a single deletion request that reaches every broker registered in that state. The platform is live. Registered brokers must check it at least once every 45 days, and since August 1, 2026, they must process the deletion requests it carries. One request instead of many is a real efficiency.
It is not permanence, and it binds only the brokers one state can reach. The United States has no general right to erasure. If someone tells you the right to be forgotten covers you here, they are quoting European law at an American problem.
So file the opt-outs yourself. Expect a partial result quickly, and a slow leak after it. Removal is not deletion, and it is not a project with an end. It is maintenance.
The practical shape of that: budget an evening, work the named list from Lesson 2 by hand, and log the date you filed against each site next to what you found. The log is what turns a one-off evening into a baseline you can re-measure. Lesson 10 sets the interval, and it takes it from the data rather than from habit.