Marketing data brokers
Opting out of marketing data brokers
Marketing data brokers hold a profile on you that nobody outside the advertising industry ever sees. There is no page with your name on it and nothing to search for, which is exactly why these opt-outs get skipped. The request suppresses categories of data rather than removing a listing.
Why there is nothing to look at
This is the category people find hardest to act on, because the usual feedback loop is missing. With a people-search site you can search your name, see the page, remove it and check it is gone. With a marketing data broker there is no page, no search box for the public, and no visible before and after.
What these companies hold instead is a set of attributes attached to you and your household: contact details, demographics, purchase behaviour, and inferences drawn from all of it. That profile is sold to advertisers as audience segments. You experience it as targeting that knows more about you than it should.
How the request differs
Because there is no listing, the form asks which categories of data to suppress rather than which record to remove. Selecting everything on offer usually takes the same few minutes as selecting one thing, so there is little reason not to.
The other difference worth understanding is that do-not-sell and delete are separate requests at some of these companies. Do-not-sell stops your data being shared onward while the company keeps holding it; delete asks it to stop holding it. Epsilon offers both behind the same link, and choosing the wrong one leaves your record in place.
Keep the confirmation email
With no public page to re-check, the confirmation email is the only evidence the request happened. That makes it more important here than anywhere else on this site, both for your own records and if you ever need to escalate to a regulator.
It also means you cannot verify the outcome directly, only that you asked. Anyone claiming to confirm your removal from a marketing database is guessing.
Why it is still worth doing
Marketing profiles feed the audience segments that follow you between sites and apps, and they are also a source that people-search sites and identity-theft operations draw on. Suppressing them will not make a page disappear, but it reduces how much of you is in circulation.
Treat it as periodic rather than permanent: these companies re-acquire data from their own suppliers, so a suppression made once will decay like any other.