Companies are hoarding personal data about you. Here's how to get them to delete it.

In February, Whitney Merrill, a privacy attorney who lives in San Francisco, asked audio-chat company Clubhouse to disclose how many people had shared her name and phone number with the company as part of its contact-sharing feature, in hopes of getting that data deleted.

As she waited to hear from the company, she tweeted about the process and also reached out to multiple Clubhouse employees for help...