Search your name on Spokeo. Give it ten seconds. What comes back isn’t just your name and city. It’s your current address, the three addresses before that, and your relatives’ full names and addresses. Often it adds an estimated income range, and sometimes a note on whether you own or rent your home.
You never gave Spokeo any of this. They built it from public records. It’s legal. And undoing it is manual, repetitive, and temporary, unless you have a process.
How do you remove yourself from people-search sites? Each site has its own opt-out. On Spokeo, submit your listing URL and confirm by email. On Whitepages, verify by phone. On BeenVerified, Radaris, MyLife, and FastPeopleSearch, file each opt-out separately. Removal takes a day to two weeks per site, and most sites re-list you within 30 to 90 days, so you have to re-check and re-file. The full walkthrough for each site is below.
What these sites actually know about you
The list is longer than most people expect. People-search sites typically compile:
- Current and past addresses going back 10 to 20 years, often including apartment numbers
- Phone numbers — both landlines you haven’t used in a decade and your current mobile
- Relatives’ names and addresses — your parents, siblings, adult children, and sometimes in-laws
- Estimated income range derived from neighborhood data, property values, and other signals
- Political party registration — public in most US states, often listed directly
- Property ownership and estimated value — pulled from county assessor records
- Court records and criminal background — arrests, civil suits, traffic violations, evictions
- Email addresses collected from data breaches, loyalty programs, and commercial sources
- Social media profiles — linked accounts found via email address or username matching
That last item catches people off guard. Run your email address through a site like BeenVerified and it will surface every social account connected to that address, including ones you forgot existed.
Where does the data come from, and why is it legal?
Every major source is technically public. That’s the foundation people-search sites stand on.
Voter registration records are public in most US states. Florida, Ohio, and Michigan make them freely available online. They include your name, address, date of birth, and party affiliation. Data brokers buy or download these in bulk.
County property records are public by design — the county assessor’s database is available online in virtually every US county. Any purchase, transfer, or assessed value is there for anyone to download.
Court records — civil suits, criminal cases, and traffic violations — are public at the state and federal level. PACER provides federal court access. Most state court systems have public portals. Brokers harvest these continuously.
USPS change-of-address requests. Here’s one most people don’t know. When you file a change of address with the US Postal Service, the USPS licenses that information to data brokers through its NCOALink program. You move, you tell USPS, and within weeks your new address is in the broker ecosystem. It’s been standard practice for decades. It should not be.
On top of public records, commercial data flows in from retail loyalty cards, magazine subscription lists, warranty registrations, and survey companies. Every time you’ve handed over your email for a 10% discount, there’s a chance that transaction ended up in one of these profiles.
Removal instructions for the major sites
Each site has its own process. None of them are easy on purpose.
Spokeo — go to spokeo.com/opt_out/new. Search for your listing, copy the URL, paste it into the opt-out form, and confirm via email. Removal takes 5 to 7 days. Spokeo is one of the more straightforward removals.
Whitepages — go to whitepages.com/suppression-requests. Search your listing, select it, and click the opt-out option. Whitepages requires phone verification — they’ll call or text a number associated with your listing to confirm. Annoying, but it works within 24 to 48 hours. If you’ve changed your number, expect friction.
BeenVerified — go to beenverified.com/opt-out. Enter your listing details, click “Opt Out,” and confirm via email. BeenVerified processes removals within about 24 hours and sends a confirmation message.
Radaris — go to radaris.com/page/how-to-remove, search your name, click “Control your information,” and email their privacy team at privacy@radaris.com with your listing URL. Radaris is slow — expect 1 to 2 weeks and sometimes no confirmation at all. Follow up if you haven’t heard back.
MyLife — go to mylife.com/privacy/remove-my-information.html. MyLife requires you to send a government-issued ID scan to privacy@mylife.com. This is an unreasonable requirement for a service you never signed up for, that profits from your data without your consent. Unfortunately it’s their stated process, and they enforce it. Use a redacted copy of your ID if you go this route.
FastPeopleSearch — go to fastpeoplesearch.com/removal. Enter your name and address, complete the CAPTCHA, and confirm via email. Removal is typically done within 24 hours.
Complete these removals in order — Spokeo and Whitepages get the most search traffic and are the highest priority.
Why do people-search sites re-list you after removal?
Here’s what nobody tells you until after you’ve spent a weekend doing opt-outs: the data comes back.
People-search sites don’t store a static copy of your information. They pull from live feeds — continuously updated data from county assessors, court systems, voter rolls, and commercial brokers. When your voter registration updates (you move, re-register, or change party), that new record gets ingested. When a court files a new document with your name, it gets scraped. When another broker sells your updated address, it gets merged into your profile.
Most sites will re-list you within 30 to 90 days of removal if any of your source records change. This is structural. It’s not a bug in their systems — it’s the business model.
Manual opt-outs work once. Staying off these sites requires ongoing monitoring and re-submission, which is why people-search removal services exist.
Your legal rights for US data broker removal
If you’re in California, the CCPA and California’s Data Broker Registry law (AB 1202) are relevant. AB 1202 requires data brokers operating in California to register with the California Privacy Protection Agency. They must also give consumers a way to opt out of the sale of their information. Most major people-search sites are registered. California’s DELETE Act now lets you send one deletion request to every registered broker at once. We cover the mechanism in how to file a DELETE Act request.
CCPA gives California residents the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal information. That covers not just deletion but any commercial transfer of your data to third parties. It applies to Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages, and most other major people-search platforms, which are all large enough to clear CCPA’s revenue thresholds.
If you’re in Virginia, Colorado, Texas, or Connecticut (among others), your state privacy law gives you similar opt-out rights. For the full breakdown of what CCPA covers and where it falls short, see What CCPA Actually Gives You — and What It Doesn’t.
Outside the US? GDPR (EU and UK) and India’s DPDPA both provide stronger deletion rights, and data brokers operating in those jurisdictions must comply with formal erasure requests.
What you can do right now
Want to see what data brokers expose about you? See what a scan finds → shows an example report: the kinds of sites that list your name, phone, and address. Once KnytX Shield launches it will find and remove these automatically. Join the waitlist to get in early.