How To Remove Your Info From People Search Websites

The grand-daddy of info removal instructions remains the regularly updated inteltechniques privacy workbook. However, even with this powerful resource in your hands, it is not so straightforward to actually get your information removed. This post gives specific links and, where necessary, additional notes on the most important eleven sites to manually remove your data from.

People search websites aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to make it easy for you to pull your information out of their databases. If all you do is search for your profile on their site and fumble around clicking links expecting to be able to remove the information, you’re most-likely going to end up on never-ending a rabbit hole of ‘verification’ forms. Before you know it, you will have voluntarily given them your name, email address, zip code, etc. without actually getting any closer to removal. This guide saves you the trouble of googling dorking the actual opt-pages and gives the links to you directly. But first, there are a couple things you should do to prepare.

• Before you do anything, get over to protonmail and create an email address dedicated to this project. Something that is not associated without your actual name is best. Something along the lines of bikerman7692. This needs to be an actual email address that you can check, because the sites will send verification emails that you have to respond to for your submissions to be accepted.
• Do a search of the site before requesting removal of your information. You don’t want to give them more information than they already have.
• I don’t want the sites themselves to be able to easily find this page in google, so I have slightly disguised the links and added them as plain text. You will need to copy and paste the addresses into your browser and then remove the brackets from the domain name.
• Keep in mind that you will likely need to repeat the process for family members and it’s probably best to have a unique email address for each family member.

XLEK.com

Xlek doesn’t make Bazzell’s short list for some reason, but when I first saw the amount of information on a subject that it turned up, my jaw hit the floor. I highly recommend taking the time to scrub your information from it. Thanks to AccessOSINT for putting it on my radar.

https://www.xlek[.]com/optout.php

Spokeo.com

https://www.spokeo[.]com/optout

MyLife.com

For MyLife there is no convenient website. You must send an email to privacy@mylife.com.

This email needs to roughly follow this template:

Hello,
My name is John Doe, DOB 01/01/2001. I have enhanced privacy concerns and am asking that you please remove me records from MyLife.com and any additional sites and sources that you own.
My current address is #1 Happy Street, Springfield SP, 00000
My previous address is #2 Happy Street, Springfiel SP, 00000

Sincerely,
John Doe

Don’t give any more info than is needed, but do include your name, birth date, a reason for needing it removed (be as vague as possible), your address, and a request to have it removed from mylife.com and any additional sites.

Radaris.com

https://radaris[.]com/control/privacy

Whitepages.com

https://www.whitepages[.]com/suppression_requests

Intelius.com

infospace.intelius[.]com/optout.php

BeenVerified.com

https://www.beenverified[.]com/app/optout/search

Acxiom.com

Acxiom requires you to submit quite a bit of info when making a request, which may be reason to proceed with caution. While this site is more business oriented and seems like a legit source of marketing data, you still might not want marketing companies to have that data for perfectly good reasons.

Also, private investigators may still have access to the information therein, so it is still likely worth your time to submit the opt-out form:

https://isapps.acxiom[.]com/optout/optout.aspx

Infotracer.com

This one is a real pain. You can only remove one record at a time. Thankfully there is a button that takes you back to the list of searches that makes it manageable. https://infotracer[.]com/optout/

LexisNexis.com

LexisNexis views itself as a legitimate marketing research source so it limits the databases that it will remove you from unless you have legal documentation (like a police report) to show that you have an escalated privacy concern. Still, it is worth it to do what you can.

The good thing about LexisNexis is the opt-out process lets you select multiple family members and multiple addresses at once.

https://optout.lexisnexis[.]com/

TruePeopleSearch.com

Protonmail will flag the verification emails as spam, so make sure to check your spam box and click on all teh confirmations!

https://www.truepeoplesearch[.]com/removal

Next Steps

Although there are tens, if not hundreds, more sites that you can go through to to remove your information from the internet, the smaller sites generally get their data from the bigger ones so, with time, they will all start to mirror each other. That’s why the top ones above are singled out.

Michael Bazzell recommends double checking these people search sites every few months as information will get re-populated as fresh marketing data works its way into the ecosystem and it is hard to disagree with his sage wisdom.

It is also still very much worth getting his free privacy guide and going through his more advanced steps, especially the credit freeze.

If you’re really ready to go deep, definitely pick up his book Extreme Privacy. It’s expensive and loaded with more information than most people would ever need, but it’s a small price to pay for all of the free resources and information he puts out.