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How to Opt Out of the Most Popular People Search Sites
People search websites are companies who use your personal data to make money. Essentially, they post some information about you on their websites and then when you click on your name you see parts or all of your home address, phone numbers, work place, family member names and addresses and other information. When you click to see more information, you are taken to another page that asks you to pay a fee to get more information. There sites are sometimes also called background checks sites or people finder sites, or friend finders. They are really data trolls who find or buy information on people and then sell it online. By law, all of these websites have to let you opt out of their posting of your personal data. To do this you need to contact the company either via email or regular mail and provide a written letter that says you want to opt out of their service. Generally, they will tell you it takes a certain amount of weeks to remove your data from their website. If after a few weeks they have not removed your data, you can contact them again. It is better to be nice than nasty. It will expedite the process of opting out. As far as other sites go, many provide an option to either delete your account totally or at least get rid of some of your posts or comments. It’s a tedious task to go into your social media and delete posts, one-by-one, but in some cases you don’t have much of an option. If the company doesn’t allow complete deletion, you should email or call to find out if they can delete your account and let them know that you have personal reasons for doing so.
To find an email address for people search website, first check their home page. Usually there’s a Contact Us page. If only a form is provided, try filling the form out telling them you want to opt-out of their service and asking them to please remove your data from their website. If you don’t hear back, try again in a week. If you still don’t hear anything, you can do some research and see if you can get a name of an owner for the website. This is turning the tables so to speak. Once you have the owner’s name see if you can track down their email address. Send your opt-out request that way. You will have to do this for every website that has your information listed, as they are owned by different companies.
If you feel the task is too tedious or time consuming and you have the money, it might be worth it to have a data removal company do the work for you. The prices are fairly reasonable and they do all the footwork. Since they usually have experience with the various people search companies already, they can get the job done quickly, at least a lot quicker than we can as individuals. They can also check back for you and make sure your data stays off the internet over time. It’s not impossible to get opted-out, but it does take persistence, time and energy. Just stick with it; it will be worth the effort to have your privacy back.
If you have questions about personal data removal, talk to the team at Wiperts.
