Whenever you make a personal purchase or sign up for a website, your personal data is sold to data brokers, which sometimes resulting in identity theft. To tackle this problem, digital data removal services have been getting popular, wiping your data from the internet so it doesn’t get used for malicious purposes. The tools for data removal services clean up all of your online data regularly. A study by SecurityOrg shows that less than half of Americans know about data removal services. Only 6% of the respondents out of 14 million total people in the USA said that they use data removal services. The three most popular data removal tools are DeleteMe, Mozilla Monitor Plus, Reputation Defender by Norton, and Incogni.
Even though not many people know about data removal services, people have slowly started using them to keep themselves safe from data breaches and identity theft. The top reasons why Americans want to use data removal services are for enhancing personal privacy, protecting themselves against identity theft and data breaches, removing their specific data points, managing their digital footprints and reducing their exposure to marketers and robo-callers.
Right now, 85% of Americans are concerned about their data privacy and people older than 55 years are more concerned than people between the ages of 18-24. Despite knowing how sensitive their data is, many internet users are still giving their information to websites which make them vulnerable to data brokers. Most Americans do not even read privacy policies before giving away their data while only 3% of Americans go through privacy policies on websites.
Data brokers also sometimes sell data to the US government that is obtained from different apps that are used to talk to and interact with their family and friends. Only half of the respondents knew about this while 71% were shocked to know about this reality. Upon asking if they know what a data broker is, only 37% of the US adults knew what it was. 85% said that the government should take measures to stop sharing users’ personal data. 48% of the respondents were concerned that their personal data can be used to train AI models which is a possibility in the near future.
94% of the internet users in the USA do not use any data removal services and there are a number of reasons for this. Some Americans say that they cannot afford data removal services because of their high costs while some are concerned about their effectiveness. To make users trust them, data removal service providers should make their services affordable and raise awareness about data removal to the public.
Read next:
• WARC Report: Meta to Lead Social Media Ad Market, Surpassing $155.6B by Year’s End
• 51% of Brits Concerned About Paywall Restrictions, Survey Reveals
