How to Remove Your Personal Information From the Internet (2026 Guide)

Your name, home address, phone number, age, and relatives are almost certainly listed on dozens of websites right now — not because you posted them, but because data brokers collect them from public records and sell them. Those listings feed spam calls, phishing, stalking, and identity theft. The good news: you have a legal right to remove most of it. This guide walks through exactly how.

See where you're exposed (start here)

Before you can remove anything, you need to know where you appear. Run a free personal-data exposure report — enter your name and state and you'll see how many people-search sites and data brokers list you, and your overall risk level, at no cost. That list is your removal to-do list.

Step 1: Understand what you're removing

There are two layers to your online footprint:

• Data brokers & people-search sites — Spokeo, Whitepages, Radaris, BeenVerified, TruePeopleSearch and 1,000+ others. This is the fixable layer, and the one that causes the most harm. They're legally required to remove you on request.
• Original sources — public records, news articles, your own social profiles. Some of this you can't (and legally can't) erase, but you can lock down what you control.

Removing yourself from the broker layer is where the real risk reduction happens, so that's the focus.

Step 2: Opt out of the major people-search sites

Each broker has its own opt-out process, but the pattern is almost always the same:

1. Find your listing on the site (search your name + state).
2. Copy your profile URL.
3. Go to the site's opt-out / suppression page, paste the URL, and submit.
4. Confirm via the verification email they send.

Start with the biggest networks, because opting out of one often clears several sites at once. We have step-by-step guides for the largest: opt out of Spokeo, remove yourself from Whitepages, Radaris, BeenVerified, TruePeopleSearch, and the PeopleConnect network — Intelius, TruthFinder, and Instant Checkmate. Most others follow the same steps.

Step 3: Don't do it one site at a time by hand — use a plan

Manually hunting down 1,000+ opt-out forms is where most people give up. Two faster paths:

• Free, guided: unlock your exposure report and follow the ranked removal plan — each site gets a direct opt-out link in priority order, so you're not searching for forms.
• Automatic & recurring (FaceSeek done-for-you): FaceSeek files the statutory opt-out requests across the full data-broker registry on your behalf, then automatically re-checks every month and re-files anything that reappears — you submit nothing and never have to remember to re-check.

Step 4: Stay removed (this is the part everyone skips)

Here's the uncomfortable truth: removal is not permanent. Data brokers refresh from public records and from each other, so a listing you clear today can reappear in a few months. A one-time sweep feels good but decays fast. The durable fix is monthly monitoring that re-scans the broker network, flags anything that came back, and re-files the opt-out automatically.

Step 5: Lock down the sources you control

While the broker removals process, reduce the supply of new data:

• Set social profiles to private and remove your address, phone, and birthday from public bios.
• Opt out of the big aggregators' marketing lists.
• Use a masked email and a secondary phone number for signups.
• If your face is the concern too, check where your photo appears with a reverse face search and monitor it.

Bottom line

You can't delete every trace of yourself online, but you can remove the data-broker listings that cause the real damage — and that's most of what matters. Start with a free exposure report to see where you stand, work the removal plan (or let a done-for-you plan handle it), and keep monitoring so you stay removed instead of quietly reappearing.