As I understand the Abine DeleteMe guide available on .pdf was used as a guide to self opt-out.
My experience is to continue to use the paid service. Others have said that they have had great success reducing the websites down to a manageable amount which they decided to stop using DeleteMe and follow DeleteMe and other guides to opt-out.
My history as old as it is seems to continue to haunt me. DeleteMe continues to add and remove websites which they monitor. The regular WhitePages, ThatsThem and MyLife… worst offenders continue to repopulate my PII which I gladly pay DeleteMe to handle.
I do understand that using DeleteMe other service IronVest in particular builds a honey pot. My use case with IronVest, masked cards, emails, phone number etc is for everyday normal use. As in yes it could be a honey pot of very mundane activities. Yes I have things to hide and I do not use IronVest for those activities.
My efforts mirrors Evolvingprivacytrend as in working on obscuring the connection between known PII history and my current PII. Constantly I tell young people to work on privacy, fixing your mistakes from 20 years ago is agony.