MyLife.com is an information broker, background checker, people search engine, reverse phone lookup tool, and provides numerous other services for the general public. It started up about 20 years ago from Jeffrey Tinsley as Reunion.com and formerly conducted business as Wink.com. MyLife has had a numbeer of different lawsuits, some class-action, against it for different credit card actions and other practices labeled as deceptive. While these kinds of services can often protect you by giving you a way to do a background check on an employee or let you closely examine your OkCupid date who you're not sure about, they do also take advantage of your personal inforamtion to profit. These kinds of data brokers can give people who are willing to do bad things with your data like identity thieves and other cybercriminals a way to find out more facts about you.
If this state of affairs is as concerning to you as it is to most people, here's how you can opt-out of MyLife.com for free by following the instructions below.
1. Visit mylife.com and register with a name and email address.
2. Find your listing on the website through search and click on your profile.
3. Copy and paste the URL of your listing from your web browser's address bar.
4. Send an email to privacy@mylife.com and support@mylife.com asking them to remove your profile (include the full web URL from Step 3.
5. You should get a confirmation email soon telling you that your request will be examined and processed in about a week.
6. Check back and make sure your data is deleted. If not, send another email detailing the important reason (you have a stalker or have an identity thief after you, etc) that you need this removed.
7. Repeat and do the search again to make sure all copires of your personal profile data are gone.
8. Periodically do the steps all over again to confirm that your data doesn't reemerge from any search engine spiders and crawlers or other public records.
Managing your personal internet appearances and reputation like this is a time-consuming, but valuable task that can help you get better jobs, avoid identity theft, reduce your Internet footprint, and reduce your real world risk level. You can always do this yourself of course, but if you don't want to spend the time needed to navigate the MyLife and the many other data brokers' confusing forms, monitor them for compliance, and continuously do searches to ensure that your data is off of these sites, you can instead use a reputable privacy service to ensure that your phone number is removed from the Internet permanently. It is always your choice whether or not to do this, but taking care of your Internet safety can help you out immensely in the long run.
We hope you enjoyed reading this guide and learned something new! Check out our Learning Center to learn more about online privacy and security or consider subscribing to our Online Privacy Service to remove your phone number, name, and address from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo search results and hundreds of data broker sites.