[pimterry]

Never used them, but I ran into https://incogni.com/ yesterday.

It's a paid service, they track data brokers datasets (I assume they just act as a buyer for as many as they can) and then manually request your removal from all of them, and then aggressively follow up and chase it for you. Interesting business model, even if it's annoying that the world means you need it.

[IAmBroom]

You should precede those verbs with "they claim that they".

"Aggressively follow up" is a completely meaningless phrase. It could just mean they put an "angry face" emoji in their email. You might disagree, but courts would likely judge it an irrelevant phrase.

In short: there's No Way to scrub yourself off the web, and no one who wants to abuse information that should remain private will ever respect a take-down request, without the menace of fines and prison.

[pimterry]

I mean sure, I'm not intending this to be quoted in a court, honestly I would say all my online comments are irrelevant phrases!

That said - it is their business, they're broadly well reviewed, and they're clearly incentivised to give scrubbing your data out a good go.

More generally, if you're in a jurisdiction with GDPR-like rules (which is a lot of the world nowadays) the brokers themselves have formal policies & tools for removing your data and chasing people manually myself occasionally I've found it quite effective.

You're certainly not going to get anything removed from any three-letter agencies or purely malicious people. Most of the discussion here though is around data brokers, who are generally large serious businesses who will at least follow the letter of the law. You've got pretty good odds of getting your data removed from any non-trivial businesses, if you follow their carefully hidden data collection policy links and then quote your local legislation and their privacy team in a polite but firm (and repetitive) way.