How to Remove Your Personal Information from the Internet

Search your own name and it's likely a “people search” site is one of the first results — showing your age, address, phone number, relatives, and sometimes more, all compiled and sold without you ever agreeing to it. This data mostly comes from public records (property filings, voter rolls, court records) and commercial sources, aggregated by data brokers who profit from selling access to it. You do have a real right to opt out — it's just spread across dozens of individual sites instead of one button, with one major exception.

Why Your Info Is Public in the First Place

Data brokers don't need your permission to compile publicly available information — that's the legal foundation their entire business rests on. Property records, court filings, marriage licenses, and voter registration are public by law in most states. Brokers scrape, purchase, and combine this with commercial data (loyalty programs, surveys, app permissions you granted somewhere) into a searchable profile, then sell access to it — to marketers, background-check services, and anyone willing to pay a subscription.

California Residents: The DROP Tool

In 2026, California rolled out the most significant consumer tool yet for this problem. The Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP), mandated by the state's 2023 Delete Act and run by the California Privacy Protection Agency, lets California residents submit a single deletion request that reaches every data broker registered in the state — over 600 of them — at once, entirely free, at privacy.ca.gov/drop.

• You verify your identity through the state's identity system with basic information: name, address, email, phone, and date of birth.
• Registered brokers are legally required to check DROP at least every 45 days and process pending deletion requests — you don't need to re-submit manually each time.
• It can take up to 90 days for your status to update across all brokers after a request, since each one processes on its own cycle.

If you're a California resident, this is unambiguously the fastest, highest-leverage first step — do it before anything else on this page.

Everyone Else: The Manual Opt-Out Process

Outside California, there's no single official tool yet, so the process is site by site. The good news: a relatively small number of major people-search sites are responsible for most of what shows up when someone searches your name, so this is realistically a one-afternoon project, not a hundred-site slog.

A practical workflow: search your own full name plus your city, note which sites actually surface your real information (not everyone with your name — check the details match), and work through each site's own opt-out page one at a time. Most require an email confirmation; keep a simple log of which sites you've completed, since you'll want to redo this periodically.

Removing Yourself from Google Search

Separately from the sites themselves, Google offers a “Results about you” tool that lets you monitor for your phone number, home address, or email appearing in Google Search results and request their removal directly from the search results page.

The important limitation: this only removes the page from Google's search results — it does not delete the information from the original website. The data broker's page still exists and is still reachable directly or via other search engines. For full removal, you still need the site's own opt-out process above. Doing both together — opting out at the source and requesting removal from Google — is the most complete approach.

The Law Behind Your Opt-Out Right

Your ability to opt out rests on a few different legal foundations depending on the situation:

• State comprehensive privacy laws — California (CCPA/CPRA), Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, and a growing list of other states give residents an explicit right to request deletion of their personal data from covered businesses, including data brokers.
• Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) — if a site functions as a “consumer reporting agency” (compiling information used for credit, employment, insurance, or housing decisions), you get FCRA rights: to know what's in your file, dispute inaccuracies, and have errors corrected.
• FTC Act Section 5 — the FTC can act against a data broker whose actual practices contradict its own stated privacy policy or opt-out promises.

If you're outside a state with a comprehensive privacy law, you're relying primarily on each site's voluntary opt-out policy rather than a hard legal entitlement to deletion — which is exactly why California's DROP tool, backed by a real statutory mandate, is such a meaningful upgrade for residents who have it.

Keeping Your Info from Coming Back

1. Set a recurring reminder — every 6 to 12 months — to re-check the major sites, since brokers regularly re-acquire data from public records.
2. Limit new public exposure where you can: use a PO box for anything that becomes a public filing, and review privacy settings on accounts and apps that might resell data.
3. Re-enable Google's monitoring periodically rather than treating it as a one-time setup.

Frequently Asked Questions