Data brokers
You can opt out today and be back next quarter.
People-search sites do not author the records they publish. They buy and scrape them from upstream suppliers, and when a profile is deleted at the front end the supply behind it keeps running. That is why a single round of opt-outs reads as a success for about ninety days, and why the only version of this work that holds is the version somebody keeps checking.
01 — What the work consists of
Opt out, delete, and keep checking.
01
Exposure mapping first
Before anything is filed, the household is mapped: which sites carry a profile, what each one publishes, and which records connect an executive to a home address through a relative, a former address, or a business filing. Filing blind across a generic list of sites misses the records that are actually doing the damage.
02
Opt-out flows, one at a time
Every broker runs its own process. Some accept a web form, some require an emailed request from a matching address, some want identity verification, and some hide the mechanism behind a support queue. Each has its own confirmation behaviour and its own quiet failure modes, which is the entire reason this is tedious rather than difficult.
03
Statutory deletion rights
California residents have rights under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA, including deletion of personal information a business holds and the ability to opt out of its sale or sharing; the state’s Delete Act adds a central mechanism aimed at registered data brokers. Several other states have since enacted comprehensive privacy laws with comparable deletion and opt-out rights. Which of these apply turns on residency and on whether the broker meets the statute’s thresholds, so we check rather than assume.
04
Repopulation and monitoring
A deleted profile frequently returns, sometimes under a slightly different name spelling or a middle initial that defeats the earlier match. Suppression only holds while someone re-runs the checks and re-files. We treat the monitoring cycle as the service and the initial sweep as the setup for it.
05
Executives, families, and the honest limit
The record that matters is rarely the executive’s own. It is a spouse’s listing, an adult child at the same address, or a decade-old property record. We work the household as a unit. What we will not claim is erasure: public records stay public, brokers outside a covering statute can decline, and anything already scraped and mirrored elsewhere has its own life.
02 — How we work it
Four stages. No surprises.
Stage 01
Free audit
Give us the names and the addresses you want covered. Within 48 hours you get an exposure map: every site currently publishing a profile, what each one discloses, which relatives and previous addresses are linked, and which of the listings are reachable by a statutory request rather than a courtesy opt-out.
Stage 02
Scope & sign-off
The scope names the sites, the household members covered, the verification each broker demands, and the re-check cadence. It also names the sites we expect to resist, because a list that promises every broker on the internet is a list nobody intends to work.
Stage 03
Filing waves & weekly diffs
Filings go out in waves, tracked individually rather than as a batch count. Each week you see which profiles have come down, which brokers went silent, which asked for further verification, and where a statutory deadline is running.
Stage 04
Close-out & standing watch
A close-out report per household member, followed by scheduled re-checks against the same site list so a rebuilt profile is caught early rather than found by someone else. Our case studies cover how the second and third cycles usually differ from the first.
03 — Common questions
What clients ask us about data brokers.
If I opt out once, is it permanent?
Usually not. Most people-search sites draw from upstream aggregators and public records, and a deletion at the consumer-facing site does not reach that supply. Profiles commonly reappear within a few months, sometimes with a name variant that defeats the original match. Anyone describing a single sweep as permanent removal has not gone back to look.
Do I have a legal right to make them delete it?
It depends on where you live and on the broker. Comprehensive state privacy laws, beginning with California’s CCPA and CPRA, give covered residents deletion and opt-out rights against businesses that meet the statutory thresholds, and a growing number of states have followed with their own frameworks. Outside those, a request is a request. We tell you which of your listings sit inside a right and which rely on the broker’s goodwill.
Why does my family keep showing up in my profile?
Because brokers build household clusters. A shared address, a mortgage record, or a voter file entry links people together, and the profile is assembled from those links rather than from anything anyone submitted. Removing one person while leaving the cluster intact often leaves the address perfectly visible through a relative’s listing, which is why we scope by household.
Will this clear my name out of Google?
Partly, and with a lag. When a broker profile is deleted the search listing drops once the URL is recrawled, and where the page exposed an address or phone number there is a separate route to have the result removed from search directly. Both are worth running together. Tell us which listings are bothering you and we will say which mechanism reaches them.
OTHER PLATFORMS
Removal on other platforms
01
A booking photograph or a filing feeds the same aggregator networks, and it clears one site at a time.
02
Where an address is visible in results, the index and the source site are worked as two separate filings.
03
A single profile piece can seed years of syndicated copies, each with its own editor and its own answer.
04
Biographical detail about a living person is governed by a strict sourcing policy that is worth invoking properly.
05
Consumer listings can expose staff names and locations, which is a guideline matter rather than a privacy filing.
06
Personal information posted in a thread has its own sitewide policy and moves faster than the rest of Reddit ever does.