What changed

You used to have to be worth looking up.

Finding out where someone lives used to take a person hours. Somebody had to decide you were worth those hours. That is the part that just stopped being true.

What already happened

A reporter asked a chatbot for a professor’s home address.

It refused. Then — in the same reply — it offered to try a different way. That route produced his home address, what he had paid for the house, and his wife’s name. It read them off public property records.

That was MIT Technology Review, in May. The professor had done nothing wrong and nothing unusual. The information was simply sitting there, published, waiting for something to be asked the right way.

Four facts were enough to put a name to a stranger.

The part worth sitting with is not any single number. It is what the researchers did with them. They took a handful of details the system had guessed about an anonymous account — not confirmed, guessed — and matched them against a professional network. Four was enough to identify one person uniquely.

In their own words, the risk is that “PII can be linked to external sources to de-anonymize users, while SPI poses risks such as doxing and cyberbullying.”

Nothing about that requires a criminal to be clever, or funded, or interested in you specifically. It requires 59 cents.

Before you carry those numbers any further

Half of that is the machine guessing, and we cannot help with that half.

Every accuracy figure above came from a system reading what people had already written in public and working out the rest — their job, their age, where they were born. Nobody takes that ability away from a model. Not us, not any removal company, not anyone, and this page is not going to imply otherwise.

The other half is the one this page has been circling. The researchers only got a real name at the end of it, and they got it by matching their guesses against something already published — a profile sitting on a site anyone could read. The chatbot in May did not guess the professor’s address either. It read it off a property record.

Published is the half a removal request can even reach. It is the only half we work on. The rest of this page is about who does the publishing, and what we do about them.

Why this lands on you and not on a celebrity

Old-fashioned looking-up had a filter built into it: cost. Somebody had to want it enough to spend an afternoon. That filter is what kept most people safe, and most people did not realise that was the only thing keeping them safe.

When the cost of profiling one person falls to pocket change, it stops being something done to a target and starts being something done to a list. You do not have to be interesting. You only have to be findable.

And what makes you findable is not your posts. It is the 582 companies that collect and sell your personal information — the ones on our list, the ones we write to on your behalf. Between them they publish exactly the details these systems are built to stitch together: your address, your phone number, your relatives’ names, your previous streets. That part is not new. What is new is how cheap it became to assemble.

Being straight with you

What we can do, and what nobody can.

We say this here, on the page designed to alarm you, because it is the only honest place to say it — and because a company willing to tell you what it cannot do is the only kind worth believing about what it can.

Here is exactly what happens next.

The scan is free, takes about 15 seconds, and needs no card. It shows you the real listings with your details on them — not an estimate, not a score.

If you decide you want us to act, this is the whole of it, in order:

1. We become your authorized agent, in writing, under California Civil Code §1798.135(c) and the equivalent laws in other states.
2. We send removal requests to the look-up companies that list you. The first batch goes out the same day.
3. Those companies have up to 45 days to comply. Most do. Some are slow, and a few refuse — we show you which, by name.
4. They rebuild their listings every couple of months. So we check again, and file again, for as long as you are with us.

Run my free scan →

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