USSearch.com is a people search engine and data browser that collects and posts all kinds of personal information to the public. What this means is that anybody all around the nation can find your personal cell phon numbere or other important bits of personal information. These kinds of sites in the data brokers category do sometimes enable something that could improve your personal safety to happen like letting you lookup your Tinder date to increase your safety in the real world. But on the flipside, they indeed profit off of your personal information and can potentially let stalkers, identity thieves, and other cybercriminals access your personal information. Without great Federal data privacy laws in the United States, it seems like you have to be proactive to protect your data at this time!
If, like many people, you don't want your personal data to appear on the US Search platform, here are the steps you can take to delete your account for free and opt-out of their unasked for "service".
1. Visit the opt-out page at ussearch.com/opt-out/submit.
2. Enter in your correct personal data at the search form.
3. Find your data in the list and click on "Remove This Record".
4. Solve the reCAPTCHA and finalize the request.
5. You will receive a confirmation email. Click the link and note the confirmation code and any other instructions and follow the steps.
6. Your information will often be removed within about 48-72 hours.
6. After that time period passes, check for compliance and do a search again for duplicate copies of your data and perform the process again if needed.
7. Monitor your profile on USSearch.com and periodically perform the entire process over again if new copies of the data their crawlers find somehow get placed on there again. Anything can always reemerge, so make sure you do this.
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, and reduce your Internet footprint, and 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 USSearch 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.