If you’ve ever typed your own name into Google, you may have stumbled onto something unsettling: a website you’ve never heard of listing your home address, your phone number, your age, your relatives’ names, and sometimes even a “background report” available for a fee. You didn’t sign up for this. Nobody asked your permission. But sites like Whitepages, Spokeo, BeenVerified, and dozens of others have built an entire industry out of packaging up publicly available records and selling access to them — to anyone willing to search your name.
This matters more than it might first seem, and not just because it’s uncomfortable. As we covered in our guide on phone scams targeting retirees, scammers rely heavily on exactly this kind of information to make their impersonations convincing. A scammer who already knows your address, your daughter’s name, and that you recently moved doesn’t need to guess — they just need to sound confident. Reducing what’s available about you on these sites is one of the most concrete things you can do to make yourself a harder target.
This guide explains where this information comes from, how to remove it yourself for free, and when paying for a removal service is worth the cost.
Where this information actually comes from
People-search sites don’t hack anyone. They aggregate information that’s technically public — property records, voter registrations, court records, old social media posts, and marketing data bought from other companies — and present it in a single, searchable profile. The FTC estimates there are more than 4,000 data brokers operating in the United States, most of which the average person has never heard of.
Behind the consumer-facing sites you might recognize (Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, Intelius, TruthFinder) sit larger data aggregators that feed them. Removing your information from one people-search site doesn’t remove it from the others, because each one maintains its own database, and most re-import fresh public records every few months. This is why people who’ve done a single round of opt-outs are often surprised to find their information has quietly reappeared six months later.
Removing yourself manually, site by site
The good news is every major people-search site is required to offer an opt-out process, and most of them are free. The process generally follows the same pattern:
- Search for your own listing on the site.
- Locate the “view full profile” or similar link and copy its exact URL — this is usually required for the opt-out form to work.
- Submit the opt-out request, typically by pasting that URL into a removal form.
- Confirm via an email link sent to the address you provide.
A few practical tips that make this go more smoothly:
Use a secondary email address, not your primary one. Some opt-out forms use the confirmation email as a way to verify you have an active, monitored address — which is the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve by opting out.
Expect to repeat this every few months. Most people-search sites refresh their databases every 60 to 180 days from new public records. An opt-out today doesn’t mean permanent removal; it means removal until they re-scrape your information from somewhere else.
Start with the highest-traffic sites first if you don’t have time to do all of them: Whitepages, Spokeo, BeenVerified, and Intelius account for a large share of people-search traffic, and removing yourself from these four covers more ground than working alphabetically through a long list.
If you’re a California resident, a new tool became available in 2026 that changes this significantly: the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP), run by the California Privacy Protection Agency. DROP lets you submit a single deletion request that’s forwarded to every data broker registered in the state — over 500 of them — rather than visiting each site individually. You verify your residency through the state’s identity gateway, and registered brokers are required to act on requests submitted this way. This is a meaningful improvement over the old one-by-one process, though it only covers brokers registered in California, so it won’t catch every site that might be displaying your information.
When a removal service is worth paying for
Doing this manually for even the dozen highest-impact sites can take ten to fifteen hours, and because listings reappear, it isn’t a one-time task — it’s ongoing maintenance. This is where a service like Incogni earns its place. Rather than you submitting and re-submitting opt-out requests every few months, the service handles the submissions, tracks confirmations, and automatically re-submits when a listing reappears.
The honest case for paying for this isn’t that you’re incapable of doing it yourself — it’s that the time cost of doing it properly, repeatedly, for years, usually exceeds what a subscription costs. If you’ve already read this far and feel your eyes glazing over at the thought of doing this for 50 different sites every few months, that’s a reasonably good sign a removal service is the right call for your situation. If you’re someone who doesn’t mind an occasional twenty-minute maintenance task, doing it manually for your top handful of sites is a completely reasonable free alternative.
A word on what removal won’t fix
Opting out of people-search sites reduces what a stranger can find about you with a casual search. It does not erase your information from existence, and it won’t stop a determined, resourced bad actor. What it does do is remove the easy, free path — the kind of casual lookup a scammer uses to add a believable detail to a phone call, or that a stranger uses to find your home address after a chance encounter.
Paired with the habits we covered in our phone scam guide — verifying callers independently, using a family safe word, being cautious about what you post publicly — reducing your data broker footprint closes one of the easier doors scammers rely on. It’s not the whole solution, but it’s a meaningful and largely permanent improvement to make once, and then maintain a few times a year going forward.
Next in this series: a plain-English walk-through of setting up your first password manager — the next concrete step in building a simple, durable security setup.