Type your own name into Google. Add the city you live in. Within the first page of results, you’ll see your home address, your age, your family members’ names, your estimated property value, your political party registration, and a phone number you haven’t used in four years. All of it is freely accessible to anyone who clicks.
The sites serving up that information have names you may not recognize: Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages, MyLife, Intelius, TruthFinder, Radaris, FastPeopleSearch. None of them hacked you. They just collected what was already technically public and built a retail storefront around it. That’s what makes this problem so hard to simply “fix” and walk away from.
This guide covers four things: what you’re dealing with, how to remove yourself from each major site, what your legal rights are, and why this is a process you’ll repeat rather than a one-time fix. The steps are real and they work. So is the reason you’ll be doing them again in three months.
How do you remove yourself from US data brokers? Work in two tiers. First the retail people-search sites like Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages, MyLife, Intelius, and FastPeopleSearch, each with its own opt-out form. Then the wholesale aggregators that feed them, like Acxiom and LexisNexis. Removed listings reappear within 30 to 90 days as source records refresh, so treat this as recurring maintenance, not a one-time sweep. Full per-site steps are below.
What you find when you Google yourself
Here’s the typical scenario. You search your full name. Spokeo surfaces your current address, your previous two addresses, and three possible relatives — your spouse, your adult child, and a sibling in another state. BeenVerified shows your age, your email addresses, your phone numbers including a cell you’ve had since 2009. MyLife has assigned you a “reputation score” and shows your employer. Radaris lists your home’s square footage and the price you paid for it. TruthFinder adds your political party affiliation, pulled from voter rolls. FastPeopleSearch shows your neighbors.
None of this required a data breach. It came from public records, voter registration files, property deed databases, and social media scrapers — sources that are individually mundane but devastating when assembled into a single profile. Your county’s property records website lists your sale price. Your state’s voter registration file, public under most state laws, lists your name, address, and party. Social Security Administration records fill in the rest.
Your information is on six to twelve sites at minimum. Probably more. And every person in your household who shares your address is exposed in your listing whether or not they ever searched for themselves.
The two types of sites you’re dealing with
Not all data brokers are the same, and the distinction matters for how you approach removal.
People-search sites are the retail tier — the ones that show up in Google and let anyone look up anyone. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, MyLife, Intelius, FastPeopleSearch, and Radaris all operate this way. They’ve designed their interfaces for ordinary people doing ordinary lookups: finding an old friend, checking who’s calling, or vetting a date. Each one has a public opt-out process, because they’re consumer-facing and legally exposed if they make it impossible to remove yourself.
Data aggregators operate wholesale. Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud (formerly BlueKai), Epsilon, and LexisNexis don’t sell to individuals — they sell to businesses, insurers, advertisers, and background check companies. You’ll never find your profile by Googling yourself there. But these companies are the upstream source feeding the retail-facing sites. Opt out of Spokeo and leave Acxiom alone, and Spokeo will simply re-pull your record from Acxiom the next time it refreshes its database.
You need to address both tiers. The retail sites first, because they’re more accessible. The aggregators second, because they’re the source.
How to opt out — the major people-search sites
Each site has its own process. Some are tolerable. Some are deliberately friction-heavy. Here are the ones worth doing first.
Spokeo
Go to spokeo.com/opt_out/new. Search for your listing by name, city, and state. When your record appears, click “This is me” and submit your email address. Spokeo sends a confirmation link — click it. The record is typically removed within 5–7 days. Spokeo has multiple listings per person if you’ve lived in different places; you need to submit a separate opt-out for each address on file.
BeenVerified
Go to beenverified.com/opt-out. The form asks for your name and state. When your listing appears, select it and submit. Email confirmation required. BeenVerified is faster than most — removal usually processes within 24 hours. The site also aggregates data by phone number and email, so check whether you appear under multiple records.
Whitepages
Go to whitepages.com/suppression-requests. Search your name and city. When your listing comes up, select it and choose the opt-out option. Then verify via a phone call — Whitepages calls the number associated with your listing to confirm the request. This is one of the more annoying processes in the space, because the phone number they call is the one you’re trying to remove. Have the number available when you submit. Processing takes 24–48 hours.
MyLife
Go to mylife.com/privacy/remove-my-information.html. MyLife requires you to fill out a form, then email privacy@mylife.com with your full name and current address. It also demands a scan of a government-issued ID. That last requirement, a state ID scan, is unreasonable. No other major people-search site demands this. You’re being asked to hand over more identifying information to remove your identifying information. It also runs counter to the spirit of CCPA, which is supposed to make data deletion easier, not create new vectors for data collection in the name of “verification.”
If you’re not comfortable sending your ID to MyLife, document the request and proceed to the other sites. MyLife is a lower-priority removal because of this friction, though their “reputation score” feature makes them worth checking before you deprioritize them.
Intelius
Go to intelius.com/opt-out. Search for your listing, select it, and submit the opt-out form. Intelius processes removals within 72 hours and doesn’t require a phone call or ID. One of the cleaner processes on this list.
FastPeopleSearch
Go to fastpeoplesearch.com/removal. Search your name and state. Select your listing and click the remove button. Email confirmation required. FastPeopleSearch is typically fast — removal within 24 hours — and the process is direct without unnecessary steps.
For TruthFinder, Radaris, and PeopleFinder, the opt-out pages are findable by searching “[site name] opt out” in Google. Each follows a similar pattern: find your listing, submit your email, confirm via link. None require ID. Add them to your list after handling the six above.
Data aggregators: the harder problem
Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud, Epsilon, and LexisNexis are the companies feeding data to everything else. They’re less visible, and their opt-out processes are deliberately harder to find and complete.
Acxiom runs an opt-out portal at acxiom.com/opt-out. You submit your name, address, and email. Acxiom processes requests within 30 days and is one of the more accessible aggregators. Still slower than the retail sites, but the form exists and works.
Oracle Data Cloud (formerly BlueKai) manages your opt-out at datacloudoptout.oracle.com. This covers Oracle’s advertising data, not the full data broker profile, but it’s worth submitting.
Epsilon requires a written request. Their privacy contact is listed at epsilon.com/us/privacy-policy and requests typically involve sending a letter or email to their privacy team — not a self-serve form. Be honest with yourself: most people won’t do this, and Epsilon bets on that.
LexisNexis is the most entrenched. They’re embedded in background checks, insurance underwriting, and legal research. Their consumer opt-out exists at lexisnexis.com/privacy/for-consumers/opt-out-of-lexisnexis.aspx but covers only certain data products, not the full range of what they hold. If you have specific concerns — particularly around background checks or insurance — it’s worth reading their policy in detail before submitting.
This tier takes longer and delivers incomplete results. That’s not a reason to skip it. It’s a reason to prioritize it after the retail sites, which are quicker wins.
Your legal rights: CCPA and state laws
If you’re a California resident, you have CCPA — the California Consumer Privacy Act — and it’s the strongest consumer data law in the US. Under CCPA, you have several rights: to know what personal data a business holds about you, to request deletion, to opt out of the sale of your data, and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of them. CCPA applies to businesses operating anywhere, not just California companies. So a data broker headquartered in Delaware with California users is still covered.
As of mid-2026, similar laws are in effect in Virginia (VCDPA), Colorado (CPA), Texas (TDPSA), Connecticut, Montana, Oregon, and roughly twenty other states, with the list still growing. The rights vary in strength. Texas’s law, for example, is weaker on enforcement than California’s. But they all create a legal basis for deletion requests that data brokers are required to honor.
Federal law is thinner. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) covers data used in credit, employment, housing, and insurance decisions. That captures some of what LexisNexis and similar aggregators do. But it doesn’t apply to most people-search sites, which aren’t classified as consumer reporting agencies.
Want the full breakdown of what CCPA gives you, plus how to file a complaint when a company ignores your deletion request? See our complete CCPA guide.
The re-listing problem
Here’s what nobody explains upfront: removal is not permanent.
Most people-search sites pull from public records — voter registration rolls, county property records, court filings, DMV data in states where it’s accessible, and social security death index files. These records are refreshed regularly. When a site re-crawls its sources 30 to 90 days after your opt-out, your data reappears in the raw input. Without an active suppression on your record, the site lists you again.
Some sites maintain suppression lists that persist after opt-out. Spokeo is reasonably good at this. Others treat each opt-out as a temporary flag that gets overwritten when the database refreshes. You won’t know which category applies until you check your listing again in three months and either find it gone or find it back.
The voter roll problem is particularly hard. You can’t easily remove yourself from voter registration, because that’s how democracy tracks that you’re eligible to vote. And every state that makes voter files public (about 40 of them) becomes a permanent seed source for re-aggregation. Property records are similar: the county records office publishes your home purchase, and anyone is free to use that data. Court records, business filings, professional licenses, and obituary databases all function the same way. The data broker ecosystem is built on top of a public-records infrastructure that predates the internet by a century.
This is a structural problem, not a bug in one site’s process. It’s why removal needs to be repeated. Think of it less like deleting a file and more like weeding a garden — the seeds are always in the soil.
The manual vs automated decision
If you’re doing this manually — finding every opt-out page, submitting every form, tracking every confirmation email — expect to spend 20 to 40 hours for a reasonably thorough sweep. That covers the major people-search sites, the primary aggregators, and enough of the secondary sites to reduce your visible footprint meaningfully. Then you repeat it every 90 days.
That’s the honest number. Not a weekend afternoon. Not two hours. Twenty to forty hours, recurring.
Tools like DeleteMe (around $129 per year) and Privacy Bee automate the submission process for US sites and handle the recurring re-submission when listings reappear. They’re legitimate options if the manual process isn’t sustainable for you.
KnytX Shield is built to handle US sites alongside EU and Indian brokers under a single dashboard. That helps if you have exposure across multiple jurisdictions, which increasingly applies to anyone who has worked, studied, or lived internationally. It isn’t live yet; join the waitlist to get in early. We’re not going to pretend the manual process is fine if you have the coverage to automate it. It isn’t. Pick whichever approach you’ll actually maintain quarterly.
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.