How to remove your personal information from the internet
Nobody can remove everything, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. What you CAN do is take down the listings that make you findable — the ones with your address and your phone number on them — and this page is the order to do it in.
What is realistic, before you start
Three things are true at once, and knowing which is which saves a lot of wasted effort:
- Listings on people-search sites can come down. They have opt-out processes, they mostly honour them, and this is where the effort pays.
- Public records cannot. Property deeds, voter registration, court filings — those are public by law, and the brokers rebuild from them. You are removing the copies, not the source.
- Old leaks cannot be taken back. If a password of yours was in a breach, it is out. Change it; do not chase it.
The order that works
- Find out where you actually are. Search your own name, and check an email address of yours against known breaches. Doing this first stops you spending an afternoon on a company that does not have you.
- Do the people-search sites. These are the ones a stranger would actually use. The walkthrough is here.
- Then the brokers behind them. Slower, less visible, and the reason the first group keeps refilling. How to opt out of them.
- Change the passwords that leaked, and turn on two-factor authentication where you can. This is the only part of the list that is urgent.
- Put a reminder in your calendar for a month from now. You will need it.
How big the job is
We have catalogued 710 companies that collect and sell personal information. 155 of them publish instructions specific enough to follow in a few minutes; the rest take a written request. Every one of those pages is on this site, free, with no account.
Not sure which of them have you?
That is the part worth doing first, and it is free. One email address, about 15 seconds, no account and no card. You see which of your details have leaked and where they are published, and you can decide about everything else afterwards.
Or keep going by hand. Everything on this page works without paying us, and it is written so that it does.