Scrub Yourself Off the Internet in One Afternoon
Once you have seen what is exposed, this is how you take it down. Data brokers are companies whose entire business is packaging your public records, your address, phone and relatives, and selling that profile. The good news: every legitimate one is legally required to give you an opt-out. The work is just doing it. Set aside an afternoon, run this checklist, and you will be off the sites that matter. Defensive, self-protection only: this is your data and your right to remove it.
Decide: do it yourself free, or pay a tool to do it
Two honest paths. Free and manual: you submit the opt-out forms yourself. Costs nothing but your afternoon, and you learn exactly where you were listed. The checklist below is built for this. Paid and automated: a removal service files and re-files the opt-outs for you, across hundreds of brokers, on repeat. Worth it if your time is worth more than the fee. The two worth knowing are below. Even on the paid path, read the manual section so you understand what they are actually doing.
The automated option, if you want it
These services scan the broker networks, file your removals, and keep re-filing when you get re-added, which you will. Incogni is the simplest set-and-forget. Optery has a genuinely useful free tier that at least shows you every profile it finds, even if you remove them by hand. Neither is required. They just buy back your afternoon.
incogni.com
optery.comThe free checklist: the big brokers first
Most broker data flows from a handful of large players. Knock these out and you have covered the majority of what is exposed. Search your name on each, find your profile, then open their opt-out or remove-my-record page (usually linked in the footer, or at the URL below). Have your email ready, some send a confirmation link. Work through them in order:
whitepages.com/suppression-requests
spokeo.com/optout
beenverified.com/app/optout/search
intelius.com/opt-out
radaris.com/control/privacy
mylife.com (request removal through their support)Then the ones you found in your own audit
If you ran the exposure check first, you have screenshots of the exact sites listing you, including smaller ones not on the list above. Go down your own screenshots and opt out of each. The pattern is almost always the same: find your profile, scroll to the footer, look for opt out, remove, or privacy, then paste your profile URL into their form. Keep a note of which ones you have done. You will want it in three months.
Suppress yourself from Google search
Removing the broker page and removing it from Google search are two different jobs. Google's own Results about you tool lets you flag results that show your home address, phone or email, and request they be pulled from search. Turn it on, submit the pages you found, and check back on the dashboard. Removals take a few days to process.
Search "Results about you" in your Google accountLock it so it does not all come back
Here is the part people skip: brokers re-scrape public records and re-add you, often within a few months. One pass is not a fix, it is a reset. Set a calendar reminder for ninety days to re-run this checklist. It is much faster the second time, you are just re-filing. If you would rather never think about it again, that is exactly what the paid services automate: continuous re-removal. Either way the move is the same, do not treat today as permanent.
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