I have a PhD in cryptography. I've spent years teaching people how digital systems work and where data goes.
I still googled myself last year and found things I didn't know were there.
My home address on three separate sites. A previous address I hadn't lived at in four years. Phone numbers. Family connections. All of it sitting on data broker sites that most people have never heard of and had no idea were collecting this information.
Data brokers are companies that aggregate public records, social media, voter registration, property records, and purchasing history into detailed profiles of individuals. They sell access to those profiles. Your name, location, email, phone, and household information are almost certainly sitting on dozens of these sites right now.
Getting it removed is possible. The process is genuinely tedious - finding every site, locating their removal links (which they bury on purpose), submitting a different form for each one, following up 30 days later when they haven't processed it.
Claude handles most of that work. This guide covers the full system.
One thing to know before you start: This process takes 30 to 90 days per site for removals to actually go through. Claude makes the research and writing fast. The actual deletion is on the brokers' timeline. And some data reappears over time, which means this is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix.
Before you start: two settings to turn on.
Web search. The discovery and opt-out link steps require Claude to actually search the web. Without it, Claude can only guess which sites might have your information rather than confirm it. Click the + button in any Claude chat and enable Web search before running any prompt in this guide.
Temporary chat. There's an irony in this process worth naming directly: to remove your personal information from the internet, you'll be pasting some of that information into Claude. Turn on Temporary chat (top right of any Claude chat window) before you start. It doesn't save your history and isn't used for training. Close the session when you're done.
Step 1: Find which sites have your information.
With web search on, run this:
Search for my name across data broker sites, people-search databases, and public record aggregators.
My details:
Name: [your full name]
City and state: [your location]
Approximate age: [your age]
Search: Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified,
Radaris, Intelius, MyLife, PeopleFinder,
TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate, and any others that come up.
For each site that returns a result matching my information, list:
1. The site name
2. What categories of information appear
3. Whether there are additional profiles under my name
Group by: confirmed results, likely results, no results found.
This gives you a prioritized list of where your information lives. Start with the confirmed results.
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