How to opt out of data brokers (free guide)

The biggest data brokers — opt-out links & steps

Below are the biggest sites with exact opt-out steps — and each one links to its own full, step-by-step removal guide.

59 more data brokers to opt out of

Also worth removing. Open each opt-out page and submit your record. Sites in the same network (e.g. PeopleConnect) often share one suppression request, so a single submission can clear several at once.

New to this? Read what a data broker is, or the full remove-your-info playbook. More guides on the privacy blog. Developers: grab the full machine-readable list in our open data-broker dataset on GitHub (499 brokers, CC BY 4.0).

Remove yourself from Google & Bing results

Removing a broker listing doesn’t always clear it from search results right away. Two free tools help take the result down too:

• Google “Results about you.” Use Google’s Results about you tool to find pages exposing your phone, address or email and request removal from Search — and “Refresh outdated content” for pages you’ve already taken down.
• Bing Content Removal. Submit Bing’s content removal request for outdated pages or pages exposing your personal information.

These remove the search result, not the source — so pair them with the broker opt-outs above to cut the data off at its origin.

What happens after you submit an opt-out

Almost every form on this page ends the same way: you submit, and then nothing visibly happens. That gap is where most people give up, so it is worth knowing what the silence means. The majority of people-search sites send a confirmation email and do absolutely nothing until you click the link inside it — an unclicked confirmation is the single most common reason a removal quietly fails. Check spam before you assume the broker ignored you.

After the click, the free sites tend to drop a listing within minutes to a few days; the paid background-check services take longer, and the marketing-data companies at the bottom of this page work in billing cycles rather than hours. A handful still answer by post. Give the fast ones a week and the slow ones a month before you treat a request as lost — then re-submit, which is always allowed and costs nothing.

Why a request does not go through

• The confirmation link was never clicked. Fix the spam filter first, then re-submit.
• You removed one listing out of several. Two addresses in your history usually means two separate profiles, and each needs its own request. Search your name with every city you have lived in.
• A former name was never searched. Records built under a maiden name or a previous legal name sit there untouched while the current-surname profile comes down.
• The listing is gone but Google still shows it. That is the search cache, not a live page — click it and you get an error. It clears on the next crawl, usually within a couple of weeks, and Remove Outdated Content pushes it along if someone is searching you this week.
• The site runs sister domains. Several of the biggest brokers publish the same records on a second address with its own removal page and no shared suppression list.
• A phone or email lookup page survived. Reverse-lookup records are indexed separately from the person profile, so search your number and your address as well as your name.

When the listing comes back

An opt-out suppresses the record that exists today. It does not reach the county clerk, the voter roll, the property registry or the marketing databases the broker buys from, and those keep publishing. Anything that creates a fresh public record — a move, a new lease, a car registration, a marriage, an updated voter file — can rebuild a profile you removed months earlier. That is a new record, not a broken promise, which is why re-checking every couple of months is realistic rather than paranoid.

Two habits make the second round much cheaper than the first. Keep a note with the broker name, the URL of the listing and the date you submitted — three months on, that is how you tell a genuine re-listing from a duplicate you never caught. And treat your written deletion request as a template rather than a one-off: several U.S. state privacy laws give you a right to deletion that a broker has to answer in writing, and the same letter works for the next site on the list.

Attacking the source helps more than repeating the symptom: how the postal service handles your address after a move, whether your state publishes voter registrations, and which retailers sell your contact details onward all decide how quickly the profiles rebuild. Our home-address guide covers those upstream records, and what is a data broker explains where they buy from in the first place.

Data-broker opt-out, answered