Genealogy site Family Tree Now made waves when people discovered it can be used to look up almost anyone’s personal information, even if they’d never heard of the site before. Addresses, family members, and known associates are free for anyone to find. Here’s how to protect yourself from Family Tree Now, Whitepages, Spokeo, and other popular free people search engines just like it.
Removing your information from Family Tree Now is, fortunately, pretty simple, provided they actually honor requests to be removed fully from their database:
It will take 48 hours for your information to be removed, but that’s all there is to it. If you have multiple listings, repeat the process for each record.
Whitepages is the most popular people search engine, with around 28,500,000 uniques every month, according to Alexa. It also provides information for other aggregate search engines. The opt out process for Whitepages is a little more complicated:
The process above will remove you from all free searches, but Whitepages Premium subscribers will still be able to search you. To remove your data from Premium searches, you have put in a support ticket:
The process will take around 72 business hours, and even then, you’ll still be visible to “Pro” level business subscribers.
Spokeo’s people search engine aggregates publicly available information from third party sources, so removing your listing there doesn’t necessarily remove your listing anywhere else. That said, it’s still worth opting out of Spokeo so your information doesn’t linger. Here’s how to do it:
Once you confirm the removal via the email you provided, you’re all set.
PeekYou is designed for people looking to reconnect with old classmates or former colleagues, but the service can still be pretty creepy in the wrong hands. Here’s how to opt out of PeekYou’s searches:
You’ll get an email to verify the removal, but otherwise your information should be fully removed. However, keep in mind that PeekYou might have multiple listings for you in their database. You’ll have to repeat the process above for each listing.
Instant Checkmate is a public records search and background check service that collects local, state, and federal data on individuals. The service is widely used, but opting out is a snap:
Again, you may have multiple listings, and each one will require a separate form. Be sure to check. You can also asked to be removed via snail mail if you prefer.
For other popular people search engines, like Pipl and Zabasearch, there’s nothing you can do to opt out of their listings. Pipl uses a web crawler bot that collects publicly available documents and deep-web data to build their index. The only way to remove information from a site like Pipl is to remove the sources, like social network profiles, court documents, articles, and anything else that mentions your name. Otherwise your data will be permanently searchable.