Data Deletion Services Video
The Video#
The Research#
Like I said in the first blog post, I’d like to start posting the process of the research for these videos. I’ve had to modify quite a bit, which will help guide future projects. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Anyways, the process of research got started back in January of 2025, when I got an email from DeleteMe (or, it was a marketing company reaching out on behalf of DeleteMe with an offer for a sponsorship). The timing of this was pretty funny, as I was already in the middle of making a video that discussed that I don’t want to take sponsors on my channel, so I thought this was pretty funny. At the same time, I was planning on doing a live stream for the first time, where I’d read privacy policies live. I didn’t put a lot of thought into it, but I decided to read DeleteMe’s privacy policy live. I had a quick peek before hand when setting things up when I noticed that I was unable to read the policy. This was then replicated in the live stream, which can be seen here.
The reason for this was a setting I have enabled in Firefox called “enhanced tracking protection”, which pretty much just blocks a lot of third party trackers. I’ve read hundreds of privacy policies from some very sketchy companies, and even to this day, DeleteMe is the first and only one I have come across to have this behavior. I found it slightly suspicious, but after the live stream, I thought I should give them a fair chance and email them the issue.
After a few days of no response, I got curious. What is the deal with these data deletion services? If they work at all, why do they work? What would cause a data broker to delete your information?
And thus, the research process began. Click here to read it all.
Also a quick update on that broken privacy policy, I also emailed the marketing company, who told me I was the first person to notice this problem and point it out to them, which is slightly concerning, and that was back in March of 2025, and you’ll never believe what’s still an issue…
The Script#
I also want to share the entire script. Yes, I know it could be scraped by AI, but that’s already true with YouTube, and I think the benefits of accessibility outweigh my annoyance of AI scraping everything I make online. It reads like a YouTube video (I wonder why…) so that can be found here!