Get yourself off the people-search sites EXPUNGE

What the brokers have and where it came from

People-search sites did not find your address by following you. They bought it, from public records and from companies you gave it to: voter rolls, property deeds, court filings, licences, marriage records, change of address filings, warranty cards, loyalty schemes, and the resale market that moves all of it around. Then they matched the records to each other and published the result as a profile with your relatives listed next to it.

That matching is why the profiles feel invasive out of proportion to their parts. No single record says very much. Your address, your age bracket, your phone number, your previous addresses and the names of the people you have lived with, on one page, with a map, is a different object. It is the page somebody looks at before they turn up.

The directory here covers twenty-five of them: the people-search sites themselves and the large aggregators (Acxiom, LexisNexis, Oracle, Epsilon) that a good many of the smaller ones buy from. Each entry links straight to that company's own opt-out page and says what the process involves, because they differ: some want a form, some want you to find your own record first, some confirm by email, at least one confirms by telephone.

What a browser tab can and cannot do for you

It cannot submit a form on another company's website on your behalf and it cannot send an email as you. The browser prevents both, and it is right to. Any service that claims to automate this is doing it from its own servers, which means you have given your full name, addresses, phone number and relatives to one more company in order to remove them from twenty-five, and that company now has the cleanest, most verified copy of it in existence, because you checked it yourself.

So this is honest about the work. It takes you to each opt-out page, hands you a deletion letter already filled in, and keeps your place: which brokers you have contacted, when, and how long they have had. Your details stay in this browser. The forty-five day clock on each entry is the response period the law gives them, so you can see who has run out of time rather than trying to remember.

There is an unavoidable trade in this. Opting out means telling a data broker who you are. Most of them require you to identify the record before they will suppress it, and some ask for an email address they did not previously have. It is still usually worth it, because the profile is public and the opt-out record is not, but it is a real cost and you should know you are paying it.

Which letter, and what happens afterwards

The CCPA letter invokes California's law, which gives residents of California a right to deletion. The GDPR letter invokes the European right to erasure. Both are generated with your details filled in and both are yours to send from your own address.

If you live outside those places you have fewer rights on paper, and it is still worth sending one. Several of these companies operate one deletion process for everybody because running two is more expensive than complying, and a clearly worded request citing a law that may not apply to you is frequently honoured anyway. It costs an email to find out.

Expect to do it again. Brokers re-list people, because the sources they buy from keep publishing and a suppressed record is often only suppressed against the version of you that was suppressed: a new address, or a variant of your name, creates a new record. That is what the tracker is for: come back in six months, search for yourself, and work the list again. For the request that goes to a company directly rather than to a broker, DSAR runs the subject access clock and REQUEST drafts it.