How to Remove Your Information From the Internet

You can remove most of it. Not all of it, and not permanently, but far more than people assume, and every step is free. What follows is the actual method, in the order that matters, including the parts where the honest answer is that you cannot win.

Budget about twenty hours for a first pass. If that sounds like a lot, it is, and it is the reason services like ours exist. Read to the end before you decide, because the last section is the one that changes how you think about the job.

Start by seeing what is actually out there

Before you file anything, find out what you are dealing with. Open a private browsing window, because your own search history will distort the results, and search:

• Your full name, in quotes.
• Your name plus your city.
• Your name plus your street name.
• Your phone number, in quotes.
• Your email address, in quotes.

Go three pages deep on each. Write down every result that exposes an address, a phone number, an email, or a relative. Most people find between six and fifteen listings and are surprised by at least three of them, typically an old address they had forgotten and a site they have never heard of.

Our free exposure scan automates the search half of this step: it runs a real Google search for your name and state, flags any result that belongs to a broker in our directory, and hands you a prioritised removal plan. It stores nothing and needs no account.

Work in the right order, or you will do it twice

The single most common mistake is starting with Google. Google is a window into pages other people publish. De-listing a result does not remove the page, and the broker will publish a new page with a new URL that Google has never been asked about. You clean the window while the room fills back up.

The order that works:

1. People-search sites. They publish your home address to anyone, free, with no login. Highest harm, easiest to remove.
2. Background-check sites. They sell a report, but the free teaser confirms your address and relatives.
3. Property and address sites. They index the house, then list who lives in it.
4. Marketing aggregators. They never publish a page about you. They supply the three categories above. Slowest to act, most important to the durability of everything else.
5. Google. Last, once the source pages are gone, so the de-listing sticks.

Step one: the people-search sites

These are the ones that hurt. Someone types your name and gets your address, your age, your phone number, and the names of your relatives, in under ten seconds, for nothing. The opt-outs are mostly easy, and they mostly need the URL of your specific listing rather than just your name.

Start with these, in this order, because they carry the most search traffic:

• True People Search removal: about three minutes, gone in 24 to 72 hours. The easiest win on this list.
• Spokeo opt out: about five minutes per listing, and you will have more than one listing.
• Whitepages opt out: about ten minutes, and it demands a phone verification. The friction is deliberate.

Then work through FastPeopleSearch, Radaris, MyLife, ThatsThem, Nuwber, SearchPeopleFree, and the rest. Every one of them, with its real opt-out link, is in the data broker opt-out list.

Two things nobody tells you

First, you almost always have more than one listing per site. One under your current address, one under the address before that, sometimes one under a middle initial or a maiden name. Removing the listing you found via Google leaves the others live. Search the site itself, not Google, and remove every match.

Second, several brokers operate families of sites on shared data. BeenVerified runs PeopleLooker, NeighborWho, and Ownerly. PeopleConnect runs Intelius, TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate, US Search, and ZabaSearch. Opting out of one member does not opt you out of its siblings, with the partial exception of PeopleConnect's shared suppression portal.

Step two: the background-check sites

BeenVerified takes five minutes and clears in about a day, but you then have to do its three sister sites separately. Intelius is the awkward one: there is no working standalone opt-out, so you go through the PeopleConnect suppression portal, and you have to create an account to get your data removed, which is a small joke at your expense. Handle TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate, US Search, and ZabaSearch in the same session while you are logged in.

Where a broker demands a photo ID, send one with everything covered except your name and address. No company needs your document number to stop publishing where you live. If a broker refuses a redacted ID, that refusal is worth a complaint to your state attorney general.

Step three: property and address records

ClustrMaps, NeighborWho, Ownerly, and Rehold index your house and then list the people in it. The opt-outs are easy. The underlying county deed is a public record and will remain one: what you are removing is the broker's republished, name-indexed, searchable copy of it. That copy is what a stranger finds. The county clerk's office is not.

Step four: the marketing aggregators, and why they matter most

Here is the part that decides whether any of the above lasts. Acxiom, LiveRamp, Experian's marketing arm, Data Axle, Epsilon, and LexisNexis do not publish a page about you. They assemble a profile (your address, household composition, an inferred income band, purchase categories, life events) and license it, including to the people-search sites you just cleaned up.

Nothing visible happens when you opt out of Acxiom. There is no page to watch disappear. It takes four to six weeks, it feels like nothing happened, and it is the single highest-leverage form you will fill in. Do the Acxiom opt out, and do LiveRamp and LexisNexis while you are at it.

Removing yourself from the people-search sites while the aggregators keep selling your household profile is bailing a boat without plugging the hole. It works, exactly as long as you keep bailing.

Step five: now do Google

With the source pages gone, Google's removal tools finally do something durable. Use "Results about you" to request removal of any remaining result exposing your address, phone number, or email, then the Refresh Outdated Content tool to make Google recrawl pages that no longer exist. The full method, and what Google will and will not remove, is in removing personal information from Google.

Use your state's law, because it is leverage

Twenty US states have a comprehensive privacy law in effect, and each one gives residents an enforceable right to deletion. Naming the statute in a removal request changes the response you get, because it moves your email from a customer service queue to a compliance queue.

Californians have the strongest position by a distance. Under the Delete Act, the state's DROP platform lets you file one deletion request that reaches every registered data broker, of which there are more than 600. Registered brokers must check the platform at least every 45 days and process the requests from 1 August 2026, at $200 per day for each request they ignore. If you live in California, do this before anything else on this page.

What you cannot remove

Be clear-eyed about the boundaries, because the services that blur them are selling you something.

• Public records at the source. Deeds, court filings, voter rolls, and business registrations are public by law. You remove the brokers' copies, not the originals.
• Legitimate news coverage. An article about you is speech. Neither Google nor a removal service will take it down, and neither should.
• Breach data on the dark web. It has been copied too many times to recall. Anyone promising deletion is selling monitoring. Here is why.
• Permanence. Nobody can promise your listings will not return, because brokers regenerate them from fresh public records.

The part that changes the job

Suppose you do everything above. Twenty hours, forty forms, six weeks of waiting. In three months a proportion of it will be back, because a broker ingested a new property record, a change-of-address notice, or a marketing file that ties your name to your street again. Your earlier opt-out has no bearing on the new listing. Brokers do not keep a suppression list they consult before publishing.

So the real job is not a project with an end. It is a loop: scan, file, verify, re-scan. Run monthly, it holds. Run once, it decays. That is the whole reason to pay someone, and it is also a completely reasonable thing to do yourself with a recurring calendar reminder and a Saturday morning four times a year.

If you would rather not, Dataremoval runs that loop for you: it scans 44 brokers, files every opt-out, verifies each removal, and re-scans monthly. It is in early access, so there is nothing to buy today. Either way, start with the exposure scan and find out what your name actually returns today. That part takes under a minute and costs nothing.