Rightly has closed. Here's what UK residents should do now.

On 1 April 2025, Rightly — the UK's only automated personal data removal service — went into administration and ceased operations. If you were a customer, your subscription has ended, your data is no longer being monitored, and the brokers that held your information have had over a year to re-list it.

This is not a criticism of Rightly. Building this kind of service is genuinely hard, and they were the first to try it seriously in the UK. But the gap they left is real, and if you relied on them, you should know what your situation looks like now.

What Rightly was doing

Rightly submitted subject access requests and deletion requests to UK data brokers on behalf of their customers, using UK GDPR Article 17 (right to erasure) as the legal basis. They covered a range of UK-specific brokers — the kind that US-focused services like Incogni do not touch — and they automated the process so customers did not have to deal with 20 separate opt-out forms.

Since they went into liquidation, that automation has stopped. If you were a customer, the last requests submitted on your behalf were whatever was in-flight before April 2025. Anything since then — new broker listings, re-listed data, new brokers joining the ecosystem — has gone unaddressed.

What happens to data after a removal service closes

Data brokers do not honour removal requests indefinitely. Many of them re-populate their databases from primary sources — the edited electoral register, Companies House, credit reference agency feeds — on a rolling basis. The standard industry practice is to re-run data ingestion every 3–6 months. That means records that were removed in 2024 may well have re-appeared by mid-2025.

Additionally, broker-to-broker data sales mean that a record removed from Broker A can reappear at Broker B if B purchases a list from a third party that still holds the data. There is no central opt-out registry in the UK. Each removal request is specific to the broker it is sent to.

What you should do

If you were a Rightly customer, the pragmatic steps are:

• Assume your data has re-appeared. Given the time elapsed and the re-ingestion cycles of UK data brokers, it is safer to assume re-listing than to assume your removals held. Search your name on 192.com and Spokeo to get a quick read on whether you are visible.
• Re-submit your opt-out to the edited electoral register. This is the root source for most UK broker databases. Contact your local Electoral Registration Officer to confirm you are opted out. This needs to be done annually.
• Contact the major brokers directly. 192.com, Experian Marketing Services, Acxiom, and Royal Mail Door-to-Door all have opt-out processes. They require individual requests under Article 17 or Article 21.
• Consider a replacement service. DataDelete covers 23 UK data brokers, uses the same UK GDPR legal mechanism Rightly used, and adds ICO escalation for brokers that do not comply within 30 days. We also run 60-day re-checks specifically to catch re-listing.

Why there was only one UK service

The UK market is smaller than the US market, and US-focused services have little incentive to invest in UK broker relationships. The brokers themselves are different — 192.com, Tracesmart, and the electoral register opt-out process have no equivalents in the US. Building the right infrastructure for UK residents is a separate engineering and legal problem from what Incogni or DeleteMe solve for their customers.

Rightly understood this. So do we. The difference is that we are building DataDelete as a sustainable subscription business from the start, with proper legal counsel on the UK GDPR framework, rather than trying to scale a service that was never quite sure of its business model.