A data broker collects personal information about people it has no direct relationship with, compiles it into profiles, and sells access. A people-search site does the same and publishes the result openly. Most of this is legal, much of it is mundane, and the burden of correcting it falls almost entirely on the individual.
Two things are worth getting straight before spending money here.
First, removal is recurring, not permanent. Brokers continuously re-ingest from public records, commercial sources and each other, so a deleted record can reappear from a source you never dealt with. That's the structural reason removal services are subscriptions.
Second, there may be a free route. California residents can use DROP, the state's own deletion platform — one verified request reaching every registered broker, and since 1 August 2026 those brokers have been legally required to process what they find there. Trying it before subscribing to anything costs nothing.
These guides explain the mechanism, the law, what removal can and cannot achieve, and where prevention does work removal can't.