Understanding Digital Footprint Management

TOGETHER WITH

Why It Matters

Personal data is a valuable asset used for legitimate and malicious purposes. Data brokers who aggregate and sell personally identifiable information (PII) can bring digital risks into the physical world for individuals and businesses alike.

Problem Statement

• The internet is full of data brokers who scrape, mine, sell, and resell your personal information with little oversight. Publicly available data, such as your address, phone number, and emails, is often used for cyberattacks, social engineering & phishing attacks, identity theft, and physical threats like stalking or doxxing.

• High-profile individuals and executives are frequent targets, making PII exposure a liability. Think of your law clerks, journalists, corporate executives, judges, government officials, etc.

• Data brokers can be both legitimate and illegal, operating through shell companies that rebrand and resurface after regulatory crackdowns. This makes the threat landscape persistent and sticky.

• Global data privacy laws vary widely (even within the same country in some cases), allowing data brokers to exploit less-regulated regions for data hosting and aggregation.

• Data removal is like playing whack-a-mole. Even after successful data removal, new data is constantly created through online activity, public records, and commercial transactions, leading to recurring exposure.

• Most people underestimate their exposure or assume existing privacy measures (like VPNs or ad blockers) offer complete protection.

Market Solution

Enter the Digital Footprint Management product market space.

• Digital Footprint Management platforms specialize in identifying and removing personal data from public records, data broker websites, and search engine results. 

• Proactively managing your digital footprint limits attackers' ability to gather reconnaissance data, making social engineering, spoofing, and spear-phishing attacks more difficult. 

• Digital Footprint Management platforms are about minimizing online exposure and reducing the attack surface for individuals and organizations.

Terms You Might Hear

• Data Broker - A company that collects, aggregates, and sells personal data to marketers, law enforcement, or anyone willing to pay.

• Digital Footprint - The trail of data an individual leaves behind online, from social media profiles to public records.

• Doxxing - The malicious practice of publishing private or identifying information about an individual with harmful intent.

• Opt-Out Request - Process for individuals to request the removal of their data from data broker databases.

• Personally Identifiable Information (PII) - Any data that can identify a specific individual (e.g., name, address, phone number, Social Security Number).

Related Product Categories

• Attack Surface Management (ASM)

• Data Privacy

• Data Protection

• Personal Cybersecurity

The Ecosystem and Competitive Landscape

The Digital Footprint Management ecosystem includes a range of players offering varying levels of service, from fully automated solutions to hybrid models combining automation with human oversight.

Digital Footprint Management is an evolving product category that can take many shapes, including:

• A one-time data removal service 

• A continuous monitoring and removal service

• A fully managed service

• A SaaS portal with user control

• A mobile app-only experience

• An online reputation management platform

• A bad business review removal service

• A set of DIY (self-managed) privacy tools and guidance

• A part of a bundle with other cybersecurity tools or offerings

• Or some combination of any or all of the above

Digital Footprint Management platforms split the “product vs. service” model down the middle, combining automation with human verification to ensure accurate and effective data removal.

Digital Footprint Management platforms can offer benefits like:

• Data Broker Opt-Out Management: The systematic removal of PII from people-search sites, data broker platforms, and aggregator databases.

• Search Engine De-Indexing: Sending requests to search engines to de-index specific URLs containing sensitive data, reducing visibility.

• Continuous Discovery, Monitoring, and Re-Removal: Persistently monitoring existing data broker sites with recurring opt-out requests to maintain a reduced digital footprint and consistently discovering new data broker sources with your personal data.

• Risk and Exposure Scorings: Quantitative assessments showing an individual’s or organization’s online exposure before and after data removal.

• Dark Web Monitoring: Monitoring to detect PII leaks in underground forums.

Players

Defining this space is challenging because it has historically been a B2C offering. Only in the past few years has it begun to migrate into the B2B world. While a crossover between the B2B and B2B worlds isn’t typical, there are a few areas where it can happen, and this is one of them. This crossover is especially successful if the cyber issue spans both your personal and business life.

A few players squarely in the B2B space (who may also have B2C offerings):

• Array (HelloPrivacy)

• Atlas Privacy

• DeleteMe

• IDX

• Ironwall (Surfshark)

• Optery

• Picnic Corporation

A few players squarely in the B2C space (who may also have related B2B offerings):

• AVG Breach Guard

• Incogni

• Mozilla Monitor

• Norton Privacy Monitor / Reputation Defender

• PrivacyBee

• PrivacyDuck (closed)

A few players working only at the C-Suite and executive levels and offering data removal as a complement to other bespoke services or threat-monitoring platforms:

• 360 Privacy

• Blackcloak

• Hush

• Nisos

• ReliaQuest

A few players with similar but adjacent capabilities in data removal, personal cybersecurity, and more:

• Agency

• MineOS

• IdentityGuard

• Sunday Security (closed)

• PrivacyBunker

And some bad players playing both sides:

• Avast Breachguard - The FTC penalized Avast $16.5 million for selling consumer browsing data without consent. (more)

• OneRep - Krebs on Security found that the CEO of OneRep had founded multiple data broker sites, effectively creating both supply and demand for OneRep’s offerings. (more)

These lists are not meant to be exhaustive. Please let me know if you see any players that should be here.

Notable Financial Events

There has been a slew of acquisitions and consolidations in this space:

2019

• IdentityGuard was acquired by iSubscribed (Aura), WndrCo, and General Catalyst for an undisclosed amount. (more)

• Norton LifeLock divested from Symantec after Symantec sold its enterprise security business to Broadcom for $10.7 billion. (more)

2022

• IDX was acquired by ZeroFox for an undisclosed amount. (more)

• Norton LifeLock merged with Avast to form Gen Digital. (more)

2024

• IDX was divested from ZeroFox and then sold to Kingswood Capital Management for an undisclosed amount. (more)

• Incogni was acquired by Surfshark (who owns Ironwall) for an undisclosed amount. (more)

2025

• 360 Privacy raised a $36.0M Private Equity Round from FTV Capital. (more)

• Aura raised a $140.0M Series G round from Madrone Capital and Ten Eleven Ventures. 

ROI and Cost-Benefit Analysis

While Digital Footprint Management platforms have traditionally been marketed to individuals, their business value is becoming increasingly clear. The more publicly available employee data is, the greater the risk to corporate security and business reputations.

• Cutting off the Attack Chain. Less exposed employee data means fewer entry points for phishing, spear-phishing, and social engineering attacks.

• Reduced Business Email Compromise (BEC). Cybercriminals scrape data broker sites to impersonate executives and target finance, HR, and Accounts Payable departments. Reducing this data can reduce the effectiveness of BEC.

• Doxxing and Targeted Harassment Prevention. Protect C-suite executives, board members, and high-risk employees from public exposure.

• Lowering Vendor and Supply Chain Risk. Cybercriminals exploit public data to mimic suppliers, impersonate employees, and execute invoice fraud. When attackers can’t easily map an organization’s structure or identify key personnel, the risk of targeted scams drops.

Challenges

The details matter in any product category, but especially in highly fragmented markets. Here are some things to look out for:

• Advanced Persistent Data. No data removal service can offer 100% eradication of personal data. Persistent data discovery and opt-out processes are required to maintain reduced exposure. Removing the regeneration and repropagation of your data is a last-mile problem separating good platforms from those pretending to be good.

• Validation Matters. It's important to understand how a Digital Footprint Management platform validates your identity. The better the upfront validation, the more accurate and thorough the data discovery, which in turn creates more accurate data removal requests. Without this, the wrong person’s data could be removed instead of yours.

• Optimizing Opt-Outs. Companies do not always manage opt-out requests consistently, resulting in significant quality gaps. Many players depend on “blind opt-out automation,” a mass submission process that sends opt-out requests without verifying whether a person’s data is actually on the data broker site. The problem with this approach is that some data brokers automatically reject bulk opt-out requests from known players. Even worse, some require multi-step verification processes that include email confirmation, ID validation, or even notarized documents (do you see why data brokers are problematic yet?). This is a deceptive practice to fake assert “quality” with broad removal coverage.

Opportunities

• Insurance Bundling. Data removal services will increasingly be bundled with cybersecurity insurance, threat intelligence platforms, and employee protection programs.

• B2B Expansion. As threat exposure management becomes more holistic in the enterprise space, data removal will be integrated into insider risk prevention strategies. Companies with a high risk of targeted attacks (financial institutions, media companies, public sector agencies) represent untapped markets for Digital Footprint Management providers.

• Executive Protection Programs. Offering data removal as part of corporate security packages aimed at C-suite executives, board members, and public figures.

• Employee Benefits. Data removal is a high-value employee perk, especially in industries with reputational or physical safety risks.

• The AI Advantage. Advancements in AI and agentic models will streamline the opt-out process, reducing operational costs and improving scale. Whoever solves this first will have a unique business model and pricing advantage.

• As a Service Expansion. Integrating data removal with managed security service providers (MSSPs), incident response firms, and compliance consultancies will open new revenue and coverage models.

Counterpoints

As with any technology investment, your mileage may vary.

• Individual Indifference. While enterprises see the value in data removal for high-risk employees, individual consumers often perceive these services as expensive or non-essential and underestimate their personal risk. This is a very similar problem to securing personal mobile devices. Unless you have been personally affected or wear a tinfoil hat (not mutually exclusive), you may not understand the risks you have.

• Privacy Creep. Technologies like this cross the boundaries between the corporate and personal worlds, making them challenging to adopt as personal data privacy bleeds into one's day job.

Final Thoughts

As privacy concerns escalate and evolve, enterprises and high-risk individuals will increasingly demand scalable, automated solutions to keep pace with the aggressive data broker ecosystem.

Your attack surface isn’t just your corporate assets, it’s also your people.

If employee PII is freely available, your organization remains exposed. It’s time for security leaders to bring Digital Footprint Management in-house as another layer of defense.