How to remove your name from Spokeo, PeopleSmart and other people-finder sites

There are hundreds of sites online that provide your personal information to anybody with a web browser. “People Finder” or “White Pages” sites such as Spokeo and PeopleSmart, often give away tons of personal information about you:

Name                             Names of relatives
Address                         Roommates      
Phone numbers               Approximate credit score
Previous addresses         Aerial satellite photos of your home
Age                                Date of birth
And more...

Not surprisingly, people often ask “How do I remove my name from Spokeo” or “How do I delete my photo and address from online white pages?” There are two basic methods to remove your name from white pages sites like Spokeo, Rapleaf, Pipl, and other data collection sites.

Method One: Automatic

MyPrivacy® is a powerful, automated tool that removes your information from many sites all at once, all the time.

Step One
Sign up for the MyPrivacy service from Reputation.com.

Step Two
MyPrivacy will automatically scour the Internet looking for references to your personal information.

Step Three
Through a simple point-and-click interface, MyPrivacy lets you easily remove information from many of these sites all at once. Then it continuously monitors online and automatically alerts you if your information appears in a new people search database.

MyPrivacy also lets you to choose which catalog mailings you want to receive at your house with the new “Control Your Mail” feature. It lets you tell hundreds of companies to stop sending you catalogs and other unwanted direct mail.

Use MyPrivacy to remove your name, address, phone, and photos from Spokeo and several other online databases. While there will always be some sites from which we will not be able to remove your automatically, MyPrivacy does work on the vast majority of sites, and can provide instructions on how you can manually remove your personal data from the rest of them. Working together is the best way to consistently combat your online private information.

If you need complete online privacy, we have special customized services that go beyond MyPrivacy. Contact us by phone or email for information. If you are a law enforcement officer or judicial officer, we offer free MyPrivacy programs for you — contact us for more information.

Method Two: Manual

To keep your personal information off the Internet, you’ll need to perform these steps every month as these sites constantly look for your information in new places and keep reposting it on their sites.

Step One
Make a list of all the sites you care about. For example, you might be concerned about sites like Spokeo, Pipl, Intelius, Rapleaf, and others. You will need to find each site that lists your personal information, and there could be hundreds of them.

Step Two
Find the opt-out procedure used by each site. Each site’s privacy policy is different. For example, Spokeo’s opt-out form is here and it can be completed online. PeopleSmart's opt-out policy is here and it requires verification by mail. The PrivateEye opt-out policy can be found here.

Step Three
Afterward, go back and verify that each site correctly processed your opt-out request. Some sites might have multiple copies of your current address as well as misspellings, typos, and other errors. You may need to repeat the process several times to get complete coverage.

We think that you should be able to control the information that appears on these sites–and you should be able to delete information if you want to. Our goal is to help you take control of your online privacy by allowing you to remove or update information that appears in these “white pages” sites.

That’s why Reputation.com never collects, retains, or provides any data to “white pages” and other data broker sites; instead, we help people remove it. Our mission is to help consumers control their personal information online.