How to remove your information from the internet: the order that works

You cannot remove yourself from the internet completely, but you can remove most of what a stranger finds in ten minutes. Your information lives in five layers: what you posted yourself, what other sites copied from you, what data brokers sell, what search engines show, and what is public record by design. The order that gives the most result per hour: take an inventory, delete or lock your own old accounts, opt out of people-search sites and data brokers, ask Google and Bing to drop what remains, then deal with what other people posted, and only then look at public records. This guide follows that order.

Start with an inventory

Spend an hour finding out what is out there. It tells you where to put the next ten.

Search in a private browser window, so your own history does not shape the results:

• Your full name in quotes, with and without your city.
• Your phone number in quotes, in the formats people write it. Our free phone check searches the people-search sites for it.
• Your email addresses and usernames in quotes, including old ones.
• Your home address in quotes.

Repeat the name search in Google Images and in Bing. Then check your email addresses at Have I Been Pwned, a free search that shows whether an address appears in known data breaches. On the day we checked, its home page listed 1,043 breached websites and about 17.8 billion breached addresses. A breach does not put your data on a public page, but it tells you which old accounts to close.

Write down every page that shows you: the URL, what it shows, who controls it (you, a platform, a data broker, a government office, a stranger) and what you did about it. The "who controls it" column decides which layer the page belongs to and what you can realistically do.

Layer 1: your own accounts

Old accounts leak in two ways: the profile is public, and the company behind it can be breached. Both go away when the account goes away. Delete accounts you no longer use. For the ones you keep, set the profile to private and remove your phone number, home city and birthday.

The large platforms publish their own deletion pages and timelines:

• Facebook's help page says you can cancel within 30 days of starting the deletion, that it may take up to 90 days to delete everything you have posted, and that Facebook Login stops working for other apps you signed up for with it. See Permanently delete your Facebook profile.
• X's help page says deactivation lasts 30 days, and if you do not access your account in that period, it is deleted. See How to deactivate your account.
• LinkedIn's help page says search engines may still display your information temporarily, and points to its privacy policy, which says your personal data generally stops being visible to others within 24 hours and closed account information is generally deleted within 30 days, with exceptions. See Close and delete your LinkedIn account.

Deletion does not remove copies other people saved or reposted, and it does not clear a search engine's cached snippet right away; Layer 3 has a fix for that. Download your data first if you want to keep it.

Layer 2: people-search sites and data brokers

This is where most of the damage is, and where an hour of work pays best. People-search sites show your home address, phone number, age and relatives to anyone who searches your name. The FTC describes them this way: they "may buy information from other data brokers, collect information from social media profiles that are public or viewable by everyone, and compile data from federal, state, and local government public records." For the background, read What is a data broker.

Three families of sites:

• People-search sites such as Whitepages, Spokeo and BeenVerified. They show up when you search your own name. Several sites often share one owner, so one opt-out can clear more than one listing.
• Contact databases that sell work emails and mobile numbers to sales teams. They rarely show in a name search, but they feed the calls you did not ask for.
• Wholesalers that publish nothing themselves but supply the sites above.

Work the people-search sites first. Our people-search directory has a step-by-step guide per site, and How to remove yourself from people-search sites gives the order we recommend. The full data broker directory covers contact databases too.

Two FTC notes: "your information may still appear in the reports of your relatives, neighbors, or associates," and "if the information in your public records changes, your information could re-appear for sale on people search sites."

If you live in California, there is a second route. The California Privacy Protection Agency's registry page says that as of January 1, 2026, California residents may use DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, to submit one request to all active data brokers asking for deletion of their personal information, and that brokers are required to begin processing these requests on August 1, 2026. The CPPA's How DROP works page says residency is verified through the California Identity Gateway, that at minimum you submit name, date of birth and ZIP code, that brokers have up to 90 days to report how they processed your request, and that they must then re-check and delete new matching data at least every 45 days. The same page lists what brokers may keep, including publicly available data. DROP sends your request to the active data brokers on the California registry, so keep the per-site opt-outs for everything else.

California's privacy law also has a general deletion provision. Section 1798.105 of the Civil Code says a consumer "shall have the right to request that a business delete any personal information about the consumer which the business has collected from the consumer," with a list of exceptions. Read the text before relying on it; whether it applies to you and to a given company depends on facts we cannot assess here.

Layer 3: Google and other search engines

Once a listing is gone from the broker, the search result usually disappears on its own. Search engines are for what remains: pages you cannot get taken down, and cached snippets of pages that are already gone.

Google's Results about you tool is the first stop. Google's help page says that with it "you can find out if your personal info, like your home address, phone number, or email address shows up in search results," and you can request removal of a matching result. The same page says Google considers some results valuable to the public, such as government or educational websites and online newspapers, and that it will not remove results with your contact info from pages owned by educational or government institutions or newspapers.

Behind the tool is Google's personal information removal policy. It covers, in Google's words, "your address, phone number, or email," "your bank account or credit card number," confidential government ID numbers, images of ID documents and private medical records. It also covers doxxing, where a URL contains "your personal info along with explicit or implicit threats" or "a significant amount of aggregated personal info without a legitimate purpose." A separate process exists for intimate images: Google's page says it will remove imagery that shows you "nude, in a sexual act, or in an intimate state" when you did not consent to the imagery or to it being made available online, and you are not currently being paid to commercialize it.

Three limits to remember:

1. De-indexing is not deletion. Google's own wording: when you remove a result from Google Search, "it doesn't mean that the info is gone from the internet," because "the info still exists on the source web page." To remove it from the site, contact the site owner.
2. Newsworthy content is treated differently. Google's policy page says that if the content is about something important or newsworthy, Google might not take it down.
3. Already-deleted pages need a different form. If the site owner removed the page but Google still shows an old snippet, use Refresh outdated content, which is for content that "was deleted from a site but still comes up in Google Search results."

Bing has its own reporting form. Microsoft's page on how Bing delivers results describes a reporting route for pages that "contain sensitive personal information posted without the consent of the individual identified" and for intimate images shared without consent, and says that "information will remain available on the original website even if Bing has removed the link from search results."

Layer 4: what others posted about you

This is the slowest layer with the least leverage, so it comes after the three above: forum threads that mention you, a friend's photo album, a club newsletter, a news item.

The realistic options:

• Ask the site owner. A short, polite email that names the exact URL and says what you want removed and why works more often than people expect, especially on small sites. Keep a copy of what you sent and when.
• Use the platform's reporting flow. What a platform acts on is defined by its own rules, so read the policy before you file and quote it in your report.
• If the site refuses or does not answer, go back to Layer 3 and ask the search engines to drop the result. The page stays up, but it stops being the first thing someone sees.

Be honest about what is worth the effort. Your name in a 2011 race results list is not the same as your home address on a people-search site.

If what someone posted is part of a pattern of stalking, harassment or threats, contact local law enforcement or a victim support hotline before you start removal requests; they can tell you what to keep and what to report.

Layer 5: public records

Some records are public by design: property deeds, court filings, business registrations, professional licenses, and in many states parts of the voter file. The FTC names "federal, state, and local government public records" as one input of people-search sites. You cannot opt out of a county recorder's office, and the record will be there again next time a broker pulls it.

What you can do:

• Know which records show your home address. A property deed in your name is the most common one. If you move, think about this before closing, not after.
• Ask about shielding programs. The National Conference of State Legislatures writes that nearly every state has an address confidentiality program, that qualifications vary from state to state, and that participants can be assigned an alternative address at which they may receive mail. California's Safe at Home is one example: a substitute mailing address for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking and some other groups, accepted by state, county and city agencies. Each program has its own eligibility rules and enrollment process.
• Treat public records as the floor. The first four layers exist to make that record hard to connect to a phone number, a photo and a daily routine.

How long it takes and why it comes back

Honest expectations, from the sources above:

• Your own accounts: 30 days to cancel and up to 90 days to be fully gone (Facebook), 30 days (X), 24 hours to stop being visible and generally 30 days to delete (LinkedIn).
• People-search sites: each site has its own turnaround. Our broker guides list what we observed per site, where we have tested it. Under California's DROP, the CPPA says brokers have up to 90 days to report how they processed a request.

Why it comes back: people-search sites rebuild from public records and purchased data, and the FTC notes that if the information in your public records changes, your information could reappear for sale. A new address, a new phone number or a relative's listing can recreate yours.

A routine that keeps the work small:

1. Quarterly: rerun the inventory searches and check Results about you for new matches. Re-opt out of anything that reappeared.
2. After any move or new phone number: run the Layer 2 pass again within a month or two. This is the public-record change that triggers relisting.
3. Once a year: delete the accounts you did not use.

Keep the inventory file. Every pass is faster when you can see what you did last time.

When to use a service

A removal service does Layer 2 for you: it finds your listings, submits the opt-outs with your authorization, and rechecks on a schedule. It cannot delete your social accounts, change what a search engine's policy covers, or touch public records. The FTC suggests asking a service how many websites it covers, whether it will give you a report about the sites it has opted you out of, and how often it will scan those sites and delete information that has reappeared. We would add one question: ask for proof per site, a before-and-after of the actual listing. A sent request is not a removed listing.

FAQ

Can I remove myself from the internet completely? No. You can delete what you control, opt out of most people-search sites and ask search engines to hide certain results. Public records and other people's posts mostly stay. The goal is to shrink what a stranger can find in ten minutes.

What should I do first? Search your own name, phone number and email in quotes, check your email at Have I Been Pwned, and write down every page that shows you. Then work the list: your own accounts, then people-search sites, then Google.

Does removing a result from Google delete it? No. Google's help page says that when you remove a result from Google Search, the info still exists on the source web page. You still need to ask the site itself.

Why does my information come back after I removed it? People-search sites rebuild listings from public records and data they buy. The FTC notes that if the information in your public records changes, your information could reappear for sale. Plan a recheck every few months.