PeopleFinders is a people search engine founded by Rob Miller of Sacramento that advertises the ability to collect and post all kinds of personal information publicly online. They claim to have tens of billions of public records on more than 250 million Americans and provide background check and other data verification services. These kinds of data broker sites do sometimes provide some benefit to people: you can look up your online date or perform a basic background check on your babysitter which is all great. The flipside is that they post your personal data publicly online without permission and profit of your data without your consent and can provide it to identity thieves and other cybercriminals.
If this is a potential concern for you and you want to opt-out of the unwanted service, here's the steps to remove yourself from PeopleFinders.com for free.
1. Visit the opt-out form at peoplefinders.com/manage and locate your profile.
2. Find your listing and confirm that this is you and opt-out.
3. Solve the CAPTCHA to verify you're not a bot.
4. You will be taken to a confirmation page where you can proceed.
5. Take note that despite claims of 24-48 hours, it may take more than a week to have the requested data fully removed.
6. Verify compliance and do the search again to ensure that any other duplicate copies of your personal data are removed.
7. Periodically do the search again to ensure that the data is not present for any wrongdoers to find and use against you.
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 PeopleFinders 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.