How To Remove Your Information from the Internet: The Ultimate Guide

Your personal data is more exposed online than you might think. From your full name and home address to phone numbers, financial details, and even sensitive records, this information is often collected, stored, and sold by data brokers or exposed through past breaches. While it takes some effort, it is possible to remove much of this data from the internet. However, the longer it’s out there, the greater the risks.

When your information is easily accessible, you become more vulnerable to identity theft, financial fraud, phishing attacks, doxxing, and unwanted surveillance. Bad actors don’t need much to cause damage. Just a few publicly available data points can be enough to impersonate you or compromise your accounts.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through your options for deleting personal data from the internet. We’ll also cover data removal services that can help you reclaim your privacy, along with identity theft protection tools that can safeguard you against future threats.

Take Control of Your Online Privacy

4.9

AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.

Editorial Rating

Learn More

On Incogni's website

Privacy Protection

Incogni

Save 55% with code COOKIE

• Get fewer spam calls, robocalls, and scam notifications
• Hide your address, phone number, and email from the public
• Lower exposure to cyberattacks and financial scams

Where is your personal information?

When it comes to the internet, your personal information is everywhere. Here are just a few places with access to your private data:

• Social media
• Personal blogs
• Community forums such as Reddit
• Data broker and people-search sites
• Dark web with leaked passwords from data breaches
• Third-party cookies in browsers
• Websites and apps
• Smart devices

Sometimes you're the reason why personal data is on the internet. For example, you might have inadvertently posted sensitive information on social media. Other times places such as data broker sites get your information from publicly available records and then aggregate it for users. Regardless of how it got there, here's what to do if you want to delete it from search results.

How to remove your information from the internet

Data brokers and people-search websites gather your information from public records, including your name, phone number, address, and age, but you can opt out of these sites. Many of the opt-out forms require an email address to verify your deletion request.

Other sites, such as Whitepages, will call you to confirm your request. Most opt-out forms also have a robot check which involves clicking on a link or solving a puzzle to confirm that you're human.

To make it easier for you to delete your information from data brokers, here is a list of popular data brokers with links and tips on how to use their opt-out forms.