I did this on a Tuesday night and got genuinely uncomfortable.
Not because anything was hacked. Nothing was hacked. Everything I found was sitting there completely legally, on sites that buy public records in bulk and put them up with your name on top. Old addresses. A phone number I hadn't used in 9 years. Relatives listed by name. One of them had a rough map of the street I live on.
You didn't put any of it there. You don't have an account with any of these people. They just have it.
Here's how to find all of it, and then how to make most of it go away.
First, the honest expectation
You are not going to erase yourself from the internet. Anybody promising you that is selling something.
What you can actually do is get yourself off the big data broker sites, which is where 90% of the creepy stuff lives, and that's genuinely worth an evening. The sites are legally required to remove you when you ask. Most people never ask because they don't know the sites exist.
That's the whole gap. You're about to close it.
Step 1: Make AI go looking for you
Open Claude or ChatGPT. You want the one with web search turned on, which both have now.
Paste this in and fill in your own details:
I want to find every piece of my personal information that's
publicly available online, so I can get it removed.
My name: [your full name, plus any maiden name or nickname you've used]
City and state: [where you live now]
Previous cities: [anywhere you've lived]
Search the web and find:
1. Every people-search or data broker site that has a profile
on me. List the site name and the direct URL to my profile.
2. What each one is showing publicly. Be specific. Address?
Phone? Age? Relatives? Employer?
3. Anything showing up that surprises you, or that could be
used to answer a security question.
Give it to me as a list, worst first.Let it run. It takes a minute because it's actually going out and looking.
What you'll get back is a list of sites with names like Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, Radaris, TruePeopleSearch, MyLife, and about 15 others you've never heard of.
Go look at 2 or 3 of them yourself. Don't take AI's word for it. Actually click through and see your own address sitting on a stranger's website. It'll change how seriously you take the next step.
Rest of it's yours
Drop your email and the whole thing opens up right here. No waiting on a confirmation, no download, nothing to install.
You'll also get the new ones as I make them. Leave whenever, no hard feelings.
Step 2: The photos
This one is the part that got me.
Search the web for photos of me that are publicly visible.
My name: [full name]
City: [city]
Anything I'm associated with: [company, club, church, team,
school, anything public]
Find:
1. Photos of me on sites I don't control
2. Photos where I'm named or tagged
3. Old profiles I forgot existed
4. Anything with my kids, my house, or my vehicle visible
Tell me where each one is and whether I can remove it myself.Old team photos. A church directory. A local news article from a fundraiser. A real estate listing from a house you sold in 2016 with photos of every room in it.
That last one is common and most people have no idea it's still up.
Step 3: Make the removal list
Now turn the mess into a to-do list you can actually work through.
Take everything you just found and turn it into a removal plan.
For each site:
- Site name
- The exact URL of the opt-out page (not the homepage)
- What they'll ask me for
- Roughly how long removal takes
- Whether they make you verify by email or phone
Sort it so the fastest wins are first.
Then give me the whole thing as a checklist I can work down.Now you have a list of maybe 20 items, each one taking 2 to 5 minutes.
Put on something to watch and work down the list. It's boring. Boring is fine. That's why nobody does it, and that's why your information is still up there.
Step 4: The one everybody forgets
Google itself will remove your personal information from search results, separately from getting it off the original site.
It's a real form, it's free, and it's here:
google.com/webmasters/tools/remove-personal-information
You want this because a site can take 6 weeks to remove you, but Google can stop showing it next week. Do both.
Ask AI to help you fill it out:
Help me fill out Google's "Remove personal information from
Google Search" request for these URLs: [paste them]
For each one tell me which removal category to pick and
write the explanation of why it qualifies.Step 5: Stop the bleeding
Getting removed once doesn't keep you removed. These sites re-scrape public records every few months and you'll quietly reappear.
Two things that actually help:
Put a reminder in your calendar for 6 months out. Re-run step 1. It's 20 minutes, twice a year.
Stop feeding it. The single biggest source of new records is anything tied to your home address and phone number in a public filing. You can't avoid all of it, but you can stop handing your real number to every website that asks. Use a second number for the internet and keep your real one for people who actually know you.
What I'd tell you to do tonight
Just do Step 1. That's it. 10 minutes.
Look at the list. Go click on 2 of them. Then decide how you feel about it.
Most people, once they've actually seen their own address on a stranger's site next to their mom's name, find the time for the rest of it that same week. And the people who never look just stay in the system forever.
This is the thing about all of this AI stuff, honestly. It's not magic. It's that a job that would've taken you a full weekend of searching now takes 20 minutes, so you'll actually do it.
That's the whole difference. Not that AI is smart. That it makes you willing.