Every privacy company quotes a removal percentage. Ours is 95% within 90 days. The figure is honest, but it is also a compressed sentence that hides the work, the limits, and the small minority of brokers we cannot reach. This post unpacks all three.

If you are about to pay us £89 ($109) to make your personal data harder to find, you are owed the long version.

What the number measures

Our target list is 150+ data brokers operating in the UK and United States. The list is fixed at purchase and published on the order page. It includes the obvious names — Spokeo, BeenVerified, WhitePages, Intelius, Acxiom, LexisNexis, Epsilon — and a long tail of smaller people-search sites that resell the same upstream feeds.

“95% removal” means that, of those 150-odd brokers, roughly 143 will return a written confirmation that your record has been suppressed or deleted within 90 days of us filing on your behalf. The remaining seven sit in a category we call structurally unreachable, and they are the subject of the rest of this article.

Tiered honesty: 80% by day 30, 95% by day 90

Removal is not a single event. Brokers respond on wildly different timetables, and we surface that on your status page rather than hiding it inside an averaged total.

By day 30, roughly 80% of the list is done. These are the automated paths: GDPR Article 17 requests in the UK and EU, CCPA Section 1798.105 requests in California, and the equivalent statutory windows in Connecticut, Virginia, Colorado and the other states with consumer privacy laws on the books. Brokers in this tier have web forms, API endpoints, or DPO mailboxes that turn around within statutory deadlines.

The 30-to-90-day band is where the manual work lives. It contains brokers that ignore the first request and require escalation, brokers that demand notarised identity documents, and brokers that respond only to physical mail. Our team chases these by hand — certified post, follow-up emails, and, where applicable, complaints to the ICO in the UK or the relevant State Attorney General in the US.

Removal is not a single event. Brokers respond on wildly different timetables, and we surface that rather than hiding it inside an average.

The five percent we cannot reach

The remaining seven brokers, give or take, fall into four buckets.

Niche regional brokers — usually US state-level public-records aggregators that exist in legal grey zones. Several Florida and Texas operators republish court and arrest records and claim First Amendment protection for the underlying data. They will not engage with a deletion request, full stop.

Brokers in regulatory grey zones — entities incorporated offshore, often in jurisdictions with no equivalent to GDPR or CCPA. The legal lever simply does not exist. We still file, on principle and for the paper trail, but we do not expect a response.

Brokers that have closed and reappeared — the same database, sold to a new shell company, re-uploaded under a new domain. These typically fall back into our list on the next quarterly review, but a freshly relaunched site may be live for weeks before we catch it.

Brokers that require physical mail — we send these through Lob.com, an API for postal delivery. Most arrive. A small percentage bounce because the broker’s listed PO box is closed, undeliverable, or returns the envelope unopened. We retry once, document the bounce, and move on.

What we do for the remaining five percent

We do not pretend the unreachable brokers do not exist. For each one:

  • We file the request anyway, dated and timestamped.
  • We document the non-response or bounce in your case file.
  • We include the broker name, the date of attempt, and the failure mode in your final PDF report.

The point is that you walk away with the receipt. If you are ever asked to prove you tried — in a court matter, in a dispute with an employer, in a stalking complaint — you have the paperwork. Documented failure is more useful than silent omission.

What we cannot do at all

Separate from the five percent, there are entire categories of personal information we do not touch and will not pretend to.

Court records, news articles, social-media posts you authored, and anything indexed on the dark web are out of scope. They are not data-broker entries; they are speech, journalism, or your own published content. Different problem, different tools, different ethics. We will write about each of those separately rather than bundling them into a marketing claim.

Why we publish this

Most subscription competitors do not publish a tiered honesty number. They publish a total, often inflated by counting requests sent rather than confirmations received, and they rely on you not noticing the gap. Their pricing model depends on it — if removal were ever truly “done”, you would cancel.

Our pricing model is the opposite. One payment, finite work, a fixed list, an honest completion number, and a PDF at the end. Saying out loud that 95% is not 100% is part of the deal.

If you would rather not chase 150 brokers yourself, Nox Æterna handles the full list as a one-time service for £89 ($109), with the 90-day window, the documented exceptions, and the PDF report included.