The Business of Helping the Ultra-Wealthy Vanish From the Internet

For the ultra-wealthy, digital privacy has become a purchasable commodity. Corporations and high-net-worth individuals are increasingly hiring data-removal services to systematically erase their personally identifiable information (PII) from search engines, data brokers and the dark web. These services go far beyond what automated tools can achieve, offering ongoing auditing to mitigate both digital and physical security risks.

Affordable, often automated services such as DeleteMe, Incogni, and Google’s free PII removal tool can only get you so far. Data brokers will “insert something like a captcha to ensure that a bot can’t come in and wipe out their database,” Tom Aldrich, chief operating officer of digital exposure reduction firm 360 Privacy, told Observer.

Aldrich’s firm, which currently works with 32 of the Fortune 100, recently onboarded a wealthy individual who transferred from an automated service. “We found 62 different profiles on them across hundreds of data aggregator sources,” said Aldrich, who added that 93 percent of those profiles included non-public information and could be removed.

Physical attacks, experts say, generally begin with digitally sourced PII. Senior executives have seen a steady rise in threats over the last two decades, with the number of attacks in 2025 more than doubling from the year prior.

“Physical and digital can no longer be separate,” Brian Hill, field chief information security officer of personal cybersecurity firm BlackCloak, which serves corporate executives and high-net-worth individuals, told Observer. Perhaps the poster child for this method is Vance Boelter, the Minnesota gunman who was sentenced in July to two consecutive life sentences plus 40 years for killing Democratic lawmakers last year, who used data aggregator sites to locate his victims.

Incidents like this help explain why the median value of security costs for executives at S&P 500 companies jumped 37.8 percent from 2024 to 2025. (S&P 500 CEOs, for reference, earned an average of $18.9 million in annual compensation during this time.) The biggest spender in this regard is Meta, which spent more than $25 million on physical and digital security for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

BlackCloak’s services for family offices, high-net-worth individuals and celebrities range from $10,000 to about $200,000 per year. Contracts for enterprise clients, including C-suite executives, board members and founders, can go as high as $600,000 a year.

The growing privacy economy

As digital footprints expand, so too has an industry built around them. Data brokers that exist solely to collect and sell consumers’ personal information to third parties contribute to a $40 billion data broker market in North America. The proliferation of a market built around selling personal information has increased demand for sophisticated data-removal services—a time-consuming, often specialized process that has become increasingly difficult to do on one’s own.

Only four U.S. states require data brokers to identify themselves via state-based registries: California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont. More than 4,000 data brokers are reported to be operating in the U.S., most of which run under the radar of regulation requirements. California alone has 545 state-registered data brokers.

Elite data-detox services remove personal information from the web, though protected public records like newspaper archives and campaign donation lists remain largely unerasable. Providers also offer dark web monitoring and security hardening across accounts and devices, including internet-connected home devices such as security cameras. Ongoing retainers and human-in-the-loop auditing make this a highly involved process.

“Reducing your digital footprint to zero is virtually impossible,” said Hill. “Our goal is anywhere from 70–90 percent removal of data.”

Affordable options offer limited protection

While more accessible data-removal providers aren’t as comprehensive as these elite options, they do serve an important role for ordinary citizens who want to limit their digital exposure but can’t afford the white-glove services used by the ultra-wealthy.

One digital security provider that offers automated removal as part of a larger set of services is Aura, a digital safety platform serving families for $32 per month. “As data breaches continue, data brokers expand, and A.I. makes it easier to exploit personal information, more people are looking for ways to reduce their digital footprint and regain control of their privacy,” Tom Clayton, president and chief operating officer of Aura, told Observer.

Despite more options becoming available, only 6 percent of American adults use data-removal services, and more than half are unaware they exist, leaving many vulnerable to privacy breaches.

“The attackers are…going after the small companies, the local family businesses. They’re now becoming the targets because they’re the easy ones,” Hill said.

Wealthy corporate executives remain a top priority, and their personal lives are a key avenue for theft. More than half (51 percent) of security leaders at organizations report cyberattacks targeting the personal accounts of their executives and their families, according to a 2025 report from BlackCloak and the privacy research firm Ponemon Institute. With digital access increasingly blurring the lines between personal and professional lives, in-house cybersecurity teams often fail to adequately protect high-earning executives, thereby elevating the need for pricey digital security providers.

“With a lot of this technology,” said Hill about A.I. and quantum computing, “you’re going to see a lot more data collection, and it’s going to be easier to go after the people that don’t set up an LLC or trust because they just don’t think they need to.”