Opting out of advertising data brokers
Most of the companies in the broker directory aren’t people-search sites — they’re advertising and data-append brokers: they buy, enrich and resell marketing profiles (interests, purchase intent, approximate location, household attributes) to advertisers and other data companies.
They rarely have a slick “remove me” page. But the same laws apply, and the same email works for almost all of them.
The approach
Send each one a GDPR erasure request (EU/EEA) or a CCPA deletion request
(California). Eraser does this in bulk — that’s the point of eraser send — or
you can send them by hand with eraser draft / eraser send --manual.
For a broker where Eraser has no working email on file, check the company’s website for a privacy or “your privacy choices” page; adtech firms in scope for US state laws increasingly have one.
What to expect
- Many won’t reply at all, but are still required to act.
- Some will say they “don’t recognise” you because they key off cookies or device IDs, not your name. If you don’t carry their tracking identifiers (e.g. you block third-party cookies), there may genuinely be nothing linked to your name — but the request still forces them to check.
- A few will ask you to use a specific form. Follow it.
Device / advertising IDs
For brokers tagged device-id-only, the useful action isn’t an email — it’s resetting the advertising identifier on your phone (iOS: Settings → Privacy → Tracking / Apple Advertising; Android: Settings → Privacy → Ads) and opting out of ad personalisation. Those pages have the detail.