Before I hand you anything, I try it on myself first. So basically, I’m sharing my experiences. Recently, I was working on finding and filing data related to my husband and myself and looked up my own name.
I expected to be alarmed. Mostly, I wasn’t.
The first thing I found was a comment I’d written years ago on a funeral page, for a woman I once knew. I’d forgotten writing it. Reading it again was a gift. It reminded me who she was and the story of how I met her and her husband.
Then I found my house. A photo of the front, the year it was built, and its tax value – all of it right there on a property site. My first reaction was one of concern. But property records are public by law. Nobody can remove them, and nobody needs to.
Then I found the part that mattered: 18 listings on people-search sites. My birth date. Addresses going back decades. And the names of my family, linked to mine.
Our parents were in the phone book too
Here’s the thing. Being findable isn’t new. Our parents’ names, street addresses, and phone numbers sat in a phone book in everybody’s home. Nobody thought twice about it.
But a lot has changed since then. What changed is the bundle and its accessibility. The phone book never printed your age beside your number. It didn’t list your children’s names under yours, or every address you’d ever had. People-search sites do. They pull scattered public records together and put them on one page, for anyone who asks.
And really, that bundle is the whole risk. Your address plus your phone number plus your age plus your relatives’ names is exactly what a scammer needs for the call that starts, “Grandma, it’s me. I’m in trouble.” With those four things, a stranger can sound like family, especially now that AI can replicate the voice of anyone.
The system changed around us. The old rule was “you’re in the book, and that’s fine.” The new rule is “you’re in the book, and so is everything else.” It’s way more than our generation has had to ever deal with and the complications it creates can be confusing, alarming, and difficult to sort out.
Exposure isn’t the same as danger
This is where most advice goes wrong. It tells you to erase yourself from the internet, which isn’t possible, or to pay a monthly service to try.
I didn’t want to erase myself. I need to stay registered to vote and be able to get copies of my birth certificate and marriage license. And I wanted that funeral comment to stay. I just wanted to break up the bundle.
So I did what I do with any closet. I sorted. Every one of those 18 listings went into one of three piles:
- Leave alone (4). Court, voter, and property record sites. They copy official records, and removing a copy changes nothing about the real thing.
- Remove (12). People-search and “background check” sites showing my address, phone, age, or relatives together.
- Watch (2). Sites pulling from my own business listings. Those get fixed at the source, then checked again later.
So my real job was 12 sites, not 18. And four of those twelve are owned by the same company, so one free form covers all four.
That’s when it started feeling doable.
Two things that surprised me
The first: the “free” report trap. Several people-search sites show you a loading screen that promises surprising results, then ask for $1 or more. That dollar often starts a monthly subscription. You never need to buy a report to remove yourself. Opting out is always free.
The second: I used a free scan at Optery to find my listings, and it worked well. That very same day, Optery started emailing me about new sites where I’d turned up, urging me to upgrade so they could remove them for me. You don’t need to. Paid services are a fair choice if your time is worth more than the monthly fee. But every listing they offer to remove, you can remove yourself, free.
One more check I’d add today: ask the AI chatbots you use what your phone number is. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, “What’s the phone number for [your name] in [your town]?” The answers usually come from these same people-search sites. Clear the listings, and you clear the source.
What if you looked this week?
You don’t have to do it all in one sitting. Here’s the shape of it – and it all relates to my C.O.P.E. Framework: Clear Clutter; Organize; Preserve; and Empower.
- Look (Clear). Search your name, phone, and address. Run one free scan. Don’t click, pay, or remove anything yet.
- Sort (Organize). Put each listing in a pile: leave alone, remove, or watch.
- Remove the risky few (Preserve). Free opt-outs only, starting with the sites that show the most.
- Keep it that way (Empower). Set a reminder to check again in six months, because listings come back.
The looking and sorting can take about an hour. (I went down some rabbit holes so I could tell you things accurately.) The removal goes faster than you’d think.
I put every step in a free guide, Your Name Online: What to Keep, What to Remove. It includes the opt-out links, the one-form shortcut, my own sorted list as an example, and a Removal Tracker so you can see what’s done.
[Get the free guide here] Your Name Online Guide. You’ll get the free guide + an Excel spreadsheet Removal Tracker.
And if you find a site I missed, tell me. I plan to update the guide every few months, and your notes make it better for everyone.