Remove Personal Information From the Internet in Four Steps

A search for your name returns the listings a search engine chose to show. It does not return the listing sitting under your address from 2014, or the one filed under your middle initial, or the marketing profile at an aggregator that never publishes a public page at all.

The scan works from identity, not from a search box: your name, the addresses associated with it, your age, and the relatives brokers use to disambiguate you. It runs against our directory of 44 real brokers, split across people-search sites, background-check sites, property record sites, and the marketing aggregators upstream of all of them.

The exposure scan on the homepage is a live, free sample of the first half of this step: it runs a real Google search for your name and flags any result that belongs to a broker in our directory. The full scan goes further, checking each broker directly rather than waiting for it to rank.

No two brokers agree on what an opt-out is. Spokeo wants a listing URL and an email confirmation. Whitepages calls your phone and reads you a code. Intelius makes you create an account on a separate portal. Acxiom wants your current postal address, on a form that takes six weeks to do anything visible. MyLife has been the subject of complaints for how hard it is to leave.

AI agents run these flows the way a person would: fill the form, read the confirmation email, click the link, answer the follow-up. When a broker rejects automation, and several deliberately do, it is escalated to a person rather than left in a queue with a green tick on it.

Where a broker asks for a photo ID, we send a copy with everything except your name and address covered. No broker needs your document number to stop publishing your address.

This is the step the category is quietest about. Submitting an opt-out form produces a confirmation page, and a confirmation page is not evidence of anything. Requests get rejected, lost, silently ignored, or honoured for one of your three listings.

So each broker gets checked again after the fact, and the result goes in a removal log with the date the request went in, the date the listing was confirmed gone, and what we saw. When a broker refuses, the log says it refused, and says what we are doing about it.

You will be able to read that log any day, rather than waiting for a quarterly summary of it.

Data brokers do not keep a list of people who opted out and check it before publishing. They ingest public records continuously: property deeds, voter registrations, court filings, change-of-address notices, marketing files bought from aggregators. When a new record connects your name to an address, a new listing is generated. Your old opt-out has nothing to do with it.

That is why the whole scan runs again every month, and why a reappeared listing is treated as a new job rather than a closed ticket. It is also why the upstream aggregators matter more than they look: cleaning the people-search sites while Acxiom keeps selling your household profile is bailing without plugging the hole.

A one-time cleanup is a genuinely useful thing you can do in a weekend. It is just not a state you can stay in.