How to remove yourself from Spokeo
Spokeo is one of the largest people-search sites in the U.S., aggregating public records, social media and marketing data into a single profile that anyone can buy for a few dollars. Its opt-out is one of the simpler ones — a copy-paste of your listing URL plus an email confirmation — but Spokeo re-builds profiles from fresh public records, so expect to repeat it.
To remove yourself from Spokeo, submit the official opt-out request at www.spokeo.com (Web form + email confirmation; takes about ~72 hours, difficulty: Easy). Removal is free — you never have to pay a broker to take your listing down. Brokers re-scrape public records, so re-check in a few months or use monitoring that re-removes new listings automatically.
Full name and aliases, current and past addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, age, and social-media profiles.
Why removing yourself from Spokeo matters
On Spokeo, anyone can look you up — often for just a few dollars — and pull full name and aliases, current and past addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, age, and social-media profiles. That is more than enough to target you with spam and phishing, fuel robocalls, or in the worst cases enable stalking, doxxing or identity theft. Removing your Spokeo listing cuts off one of the easiest public sources of that data about you.
Opting out of Spokeo is quick and straightforward — it works via web form + email confirmation, and removals usually process in ~72 hours. It is free: under U.S. privacy laws Spokeo has to honor opt-out requests, so never pay a "removal" fee. Most people finish it in just a few minutes.
How to opt out of Spokeo, step by step
Go to spokeo.com and search your name (add your city/state to find the right listing).
Open your profile and copy the full URL from the address bar.
Visit spokeo.com/optout, paste the profile URL, enter an email address, and complete the CAPTCHA.
Open the confirmation email from Spokeo and click the verification link — the removal isn’t processed until you do.
Link verified June 2026 — brokers change their forms, so confirm it’s the official spokeo.com opt-out before entering anything.
Watch out: Spokeo often has more than one listing per person (different addresses or name spellings). Search a few variations and submit each profile URL separately — removing one won’t remove the others.
What a Spokeo profile actually shows
Spokeo does not hold a secret about you. What it does is assemble — county records, voter files, property deeds, court filings, marketing lists and whatever your social profiles left public all land on one page under your name, sorted and cross-linked. The discomfort is in the assembly, not the individual facts: separately they are scattered across a dozen government offices, together they read as a dossier.
A search is free and shows enough to confirm the profile is yours — name, age, a city, a blurred hint of relatives. The full report sits behind a subscription, which is the part people find infuriating: a stranger pays a few dollars and reads what took you years to accumulate. Removal costs nothing, and Spokeo cannot ask you to pay for it.
- Full legal name plus aliases, maiden names and spelling variants
- Age and date-of-birth month — enough to clear a lazy identity check on a support line
- Current address and an address history going back years, often with a map
- Landline and mobile numbers, including numbers you never published anywhere
- Email addresses, and the social and dating profiles Spokeo matched to them
- Relatives and "associates", each one a link into their own profile
How long the Spokeo opt-out takes — and what happens in between
The form takes about two minutes: paste the URL of the profile, give an email address, clear the CAPTCHA. Spokeo then emails you a confirmation link, and nothing happens at all until you click it. The listing typically disappears within about 72 hours of that click, sometimes sooner.
Use an inbox you can actually open, but it does not have to be your main one — an alias or a forwarding address works fine, and Spokeo has no reason to keep it once the record is suppressed. Do not paste the email address you are trying to get off the internet if you have a cleaner alternative.
Before you submit, copy the profile URL into a note with the date. Three months from now, that is how you tell a re-listing apart from a duplicate you never removed in the first place — and you will have the exact URL to re-check instead of searching yourself all over again.
Why your Spokeo 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 Spokeo buys from, and those keep publishing. Anything that generates 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 ago.
That is not Spokeo ignoring your request; it is the same machine producing a new record that the old suppression does not cover. Which is also why re-checking every couple of months is realistic rather than paranoid, and why the removal is not one-per-customer: submit it again as many times as you need.
If you would rather attack the source than the symptom, the leverage sits in the records you can still control — how the postal service handles your address after a move, whether your state publishes voter registrations, and which retailers and loyalty programs sell your contact details onward.
Why a Spokeo opt-out sometimes does not stick
When someone tells us the removal "did not work", it is nearly always one of a handful of specific things rather than the site refusing the request.
- The confirmation email was never clicked. It lands in spam often enough that this is the single most common reason a removal quietly fails.
- Only one of several profiles was submitted. Two addresses in your history routinely means two separate listings, and each one needs its own URL.
- The profile removed was a near-match — a different middle initial, or a relative with your name in the same town.
- The search was run under a current surname only, leaving records built under a maiden name or a previous legal name untouched.
- A reverse phone or email page still resolves. Those are indexed separately from the person profile and survive its removal.
Sample opt-out letter for Spokeo
Some brokers accept (or require) a written deletion request by email. Here’s a ready-to-send template addressed to Spokeo — open it in the generator to add your details and your state’s legal basis.
To the Privacy / Opt-Out Team at Spokeo, I am writing to request that you remove my listing and delete all personal information you hold about me, and that you stop selling or sharing it. I am making this request as a consumer exercising your opt-out and deletion process. To identify my records: Full name: [Your full name] Please take the following actions: 1. Delete all personal information you have collected about me. 2. Suppress my profile so it no longer appears on your website or any affiliated/partner sites. 3. Stop selling, sharing or licensing my personal information to third parties. 4. Confirm in writing once these steps are complete. Please process this request and respond within 45 days. If you need to verify my identity, contact me using the details above — but please do not require more information than is necessary to do so. Thank you for your prompt attention. Sincerely, [Your full name]
Spokeo is one of hundreds
Removing Spokeo is a great start — but your data is on many more sites, and Spokeo can re-list you within weeks. PersProtect removes you from 499 broker and people-search sites and keeps re-checking so you stay off.
Scan all 499 sites — free →Removing yourself from Spokeo, answered
How long does Spokeo take to remove my information?
Usually within 72 hours of clicking the confirmation link. If your profile is still visible after a few days, re-submit the URL — and check for duplicate listings.
Does Spokeo removal cost anything?
No. The opt-out is free and legally required. You never need a paid Spokeo account to remove your own data.
Do I have to create a Spokeo account to opt out?
No, and you should not. The removal form asks for a listing URL and an email address, nothing else. If a page is asking you to sign up or pay before it will take a listing down, you are not on the official opt-out page — the real one is spokeo.com/optout.
Can I remove my phone number from Spokeo without removing the whole listing?
Not selectively. Spokeo suppresses the profile as a unit, so the phone number goes when the listing does. The catch is that Spokeo also indexes phone numbers on their own reverse-lookup pages, and those can survive as a separate record — search your number on the site after the profile is gone and submit anything that still resolves.
Why does my Spokeo listing show an address I moved out of years ago?
Because address history is the product. Spokeo keeps every address it has ever associated with your name, which is why a profile can list a college apartment, a parent's house and your current street in one column. Old addresses also tend to create a second profile of their own, so check for duplicates before you assume you are done.
My Spokeo profile is gone but it still comes up in Google. Why?
That is the search cache rather than a live listing — click it and you get an error page. Google re-crawls the dead URL on its own schedule and drops it, usually inside a couple of weeks. If someone is searching you this week and the wait matters, the Remove Outdated Content tool in Google Search Console pushes a re-crawl of a page that no longer loads.
Does opting out of Spokeo remove me from other people-search sites?
No. Spokeo and the sites that look like it are separate companies pulling from the same public-record and marketing feeds, not from each other. Each keeps its own copy and runs its own opt-out, so a Spokeo removal does nothing for Radaris, MyLife, BeenVerified or the rest.
Is Spokeo legal?
Selling aggregated public records is legal in the U.S. Using them for hiring, tenant or credit decisions is not, unless the seller follows the Fair Credit Reporting Act — Spokeo states it is not a consumer-reporting agency and that its reports must not be used that way. The FTC fined the company $800,000 in 2012 over marketing profiles to recruiters, which is the reason that disclaimer now sits on every page.
Opt out of other data brokers
See the full list of 100+ brokers and the Google/Bing removal steps in the data-broker opt-out guide. New to this? What is a data broker? · Comparing services? Best data-removal services 2026.