The data broker removal guide.
Everything that works right now, from the method behind every opt-out to the new California system that reaches hundreds of brokers in one request. Verified current, July 2026.
Type your name into a search engine and the top results probably include your home address alongside your phone number, with your age and a map of your relatives underneath. The sites publishing that file are people-search brokers. Their business is packaging public records into a profile any stranger can pull in thirty seconds. This guide removes you from the ones that matter and keeps you removed. It runs long because the honest version of this job runs long. The first afternoon does most of the work.
Know the machine.
Removal makes sense once you see the industry’s shape. The shape explains why listings come back and where your effort pays best.
| Layer | What it does |
|---|---|
| The sources | County deeds, voter rolls, court filings, marketing lists, old breaches. These feed everything above them. Mostly they cannot be deleted, only avoided going forward. |
| The wholesalers | Aggregators like Acxiom and Epsilon compile the sources into master files and sell to businesses. You rarely see them, and suppression here is more durable than anywhere downstream. |
| The storefronts | People-search sites like Whitepages and Spokeo buy from the layers above and publish a searchable profile. This is where strangers actually look, so it is where you start. |
What you achieve is suppression. Your listing comes down and a do-not-republish flag goes on file. The underlying records persist upstream, and profiles commonly reappear within one to three months when a broker refreshes from its sources. Part 07 exists for exactly that reason. Suppressed and re-checked quarterly beats findable in thirty seconds, and the gap between those two states is where most real-world harm lives.
Build the kit.
Twenty minutes of setup. Everything after goes faster because of it.
The method.
Every storefront removal is the same five moves wearing a different interface. Learn the moves once and no redesign or renamed menu can slow you down.
| Move | What you do |
|---|---|
| Locate | Search your name on the site itself. Copy the exact URL of your profile page, since most opt-out forms require it. Check old cities and maiden names, because brokers split one person into several records. |
| Find the exit | Scroll to the footer. The link is labeled opt out, do not sell my info, remove my information, or privacy request. If the footer hides it, search the web for the site’s name plus opt out. |
| Submit lean | Provide only what the form demands, from your kit identifiers. Decline every optional field. |
| Confirm same-day | Most sites email a confirmation link, and many expire quickly. Click it the day it arrives and log the date. |
| Verify yourself | Search yourself on the site again about a week later and record the result. Confirmation emails claim success. Only a clean search proves it. |
The first afternoon: eleven targets.
These storefronts carry the bulk of search-result exposure, and several parent companies cover multiple brands in one pass. Work the list top to bottom with the five moves. Expect anywhere from fifteen minutes to a few weeks for a listing to clear, with most of the majors landing inside a couple of days.
The full sweep: the master list.
Beyond the first eleven sit well over a hundred smaller brokers and lookup sites. The definitive map of them is a community project, and it deserves to be named.
The Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List, maintained on GitHub since 2017 by journalist Yael Grauer with community contributions, is the most complete free opt-out reference in existence. It holds to a standard we respect: with few exceptions it only lists brokers where you can verify they hold your data, free, before handing over anything new. It is organized for triage, with a marked first tier of about fourteen high-priority sites and a second tier of roughly twenty-two before the long tail, and it carries honest disclaimers about slow processing and brokers that require repeat opt-outs.
How it fits this guide: our Part 04 targets overlap its top tier, and the method in Part 03 is how you execute every entry on it. When your stranger search keeps surfacing sites past the first eleven, open the list, work its priority marks with your tracking sheet, and budget real hours. The full sweep is a project measured in evenings. It is also the closest a private person gets to a complete manual purge, and pairing it with the California request below covers both ends of the industry.
The legal layer: one request, hundreds of brokers.
The law caught up in 2026, and if you live in California the single most powerful move in this guide is new this year.
California’s Delete Act built a state-run system called DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, which went live for consumers on January 1, 2026. One verified request through the state directs every data broker registered in California, more than five hundred of them at last count, to delete your personal information, inferences included, and to keep it deleted going forward. You file at privacy.ca.gov, verify residency through the state’s identity gateway or Login.gov, and can return to check status. Brokers begin processing the queue on August 1, 2026 and must then work it at least every 45 days, so requests filed now land in the first wave.
Outside California, four states now run data broker registration laws, while most state privacy laws grant deletion rights you can cite directly. The practical version: when a stubborn broker ignores your second request, a short written follow-up citing your state’s deletion right, sent from your alias with the original request date, moves sites that silence did not. Several states also allow an authorized agent to file on your behalf, which is the legal hook paid services and firms like ours use.
DROP reaches registered brokers. It does not empty the county deed book or the voter file, or any source record, and it does not bind sites that ignore California registration. Treat it as the artillery behind the manual work in Part 04, and keep the stranger search as your ground truth.
Clean the search results.
Site-level removal first, then delist the survivors from where people actually look.
Delisting removes the doorway, and the page itself still stands. That is fine. The threat model for most people is the thirty-second stranger, and the thirty-second stranger uses the doorway.
Hold the ground.
Re-listing is a feature of the industry, so maintenance is a feature of the practice.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Day 30 | Re-run the stranger search against your sheet. Resubmit anything that returned, and note which brokers relisted, because they will do it again. |
| Day 90 | Full pass: the stranger search and sheet reconciliation, then the Results About You queue. Add any new sites your search surfaces. |
| Quarterly after | The hour that keeps the afternoon’s work standing. Calendar it, or it will not happen. |
Two habits shrink the maintenance forever. Stop feeding the sources: an alias email for signups and a VoIP number for forms, with a mailing address that is a box rather than your door means new records stop forming upstream. And when the quarterly hour stops being worth your time, or the person searching for you is a genuine threat, that is the line where this stops being a chore and becomes our work. Darkveil runs continuous suppression and monitoring, with the legal-agent layer on top, for people whose situation justifies it.
Sources and further reading.
This guide was verified against current broker processes and California’s official DROP documentation in July 2026, with Google’s published removal flows checked the same week. The wider methodology draws on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense, published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and on Privacy Guides. Darkveil practice sits underneath.
This guide covers what you can do yourself. When the situation is a stalker or a public role, a threat that persists, that is Darkveil’s work.
Talk to Darkveil