How to remove your personal information from the internet

Quick answer

You cannot remove yourself from the internet, and no service can do it for you. Public records, news archives, court filings and things other people posted are largely permanent.

What you can do, in roughly this order:

1. Find what is out there — search yourself properly
2. Remove it from search results — the fastest visible win
3. Opt out of people-search sites and data brokers — the main source
4. Close old accounts — the leaks that have not happened yet
5. Clean up what you published — social media, forums, photos
6. Cut the supply — so the same profile does not rebuild
7. Repeat every few months — because it will rebuild anyway

Two or three hours gets most of the benefit. The rest is maintenance.

First, decide what actually matters

Not all exposure is equal, and treating it as equal is how people give up.

Work top-down. Removing an embarrassing forum post from 2011 feels productive; removing your home address from four people-search sites actually reduces risk.

Step 1 — Search yourself properly

Ten minutes, and it defines everything after it.

• Your full name in quotation marks, then again with your city
• Your name plus your employer, school, or profession
• Your phone number, in a few formats
• Each of your email addresses
• Your usernames, especially ones you reused
• Your name in Google Images
• Your email at Have I Been Pwned, to see which breaches include you

Search in a private window so your own history does not shape results. Try more than one search engine — Bing and DuckDuckGo surface different pages.

Keep a list as you go: the site, what it shows, and the link to its removal page. That list is your working document.

Step 2 — Remove it from search results

Most people find you by searching, so this is the fastest reduction in practical exposure.

Google's Results about you scans for search results containing your phone number, home address or email address and lets you request removal. It is at goo.gle/resultsaboutyou, or through your profile picture in the Google app. As of a February 2026 update it also flags results containing government ID numbers.

Google's removal policy also covers confidential government ID numbers, bank and card numbers, images of handwritten signatures, images of ID documents, restricted medical records, and confidential login credentials.

Bing has an equivalent content removal request form. Use both.

Step 3 — Opt out of people-search sites and data brokers

This is where most of your profile lives. A data broker is a company that collects information about people it has no relationship with, assembles profiles, and sells access — often surfacing as a people-search site listing your address, age, relatives and phone number.

If you live in California

Use DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform run by the California Privacy Protection Agency. It is free, launched on 1 January 2026, and sends a single verified deletion request to every registered data broker in California — more than 500 of them. Brokers began processing requests on 1 August 2026 and must continue checking every 45 days.

This is by a wide margin the biggest single action available to anyone eligible for it. The consumer portal is at consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov.

Everyone else

You are opting out one company at a time. It is tedious rather than difficult:

1. Work from your search list, plus the sites you know are large.
2. Find the opt-out link, usually in the footer as "Do Not Sell My Info", "Opt Out", or inside the privacy policy.
3. Find your listing and submit the removal request.
4. Verify by email if asked. Use an address you keep for this purpose.
5. Record what you did and when.

Your rights depend on where you live

• California, and a growing number of US states, give a right to request deletion. Requests are free, and a business may not refuse service because you made one.
• The UK and EU give a right to erasure under GDPR, which is broader than most US rights and applies to any company processing your data.
• Elsewhere, check your national data protection authority — many countries have equivalent rights.

Where you have a legal right, say so in the request. It changes the response rate.

Step 4 — Close old accounts

Every account you have abandoned still holds whatever you gave it, and is still capable of being breached. This is the step people skip and it is one of the most valuable.

• Search your email for "welcome", "verify your account" and "confirm your email" to find what you signed up to.
• Check your password manager, which is often the most complete list you have.
• Check Have I Been Pwned for services you had forgotten existed.
• Delete rather than abandon. Most services bury this under settings, privacy, or account. Some require an email request.
• Before deleting, remove stored payment cards and addresses where you can — some services retain data on closed accounts.

If any of them turn up in a leak, password exposed in a data breach sets out what each type of leaked detail actually requires.

Step 5 — Clean up what you published

• Social media: set old posts to private in bulk where the platform allows it. Remove your birthday, phone number, home town and employer from public profiles — these are the answers to security questions.
• Photos: remove ones showing your house number, street sign, car number plate, or documents in the background. Turn off location tagging going forward.
• Old forum and comment accounts: delete or edit posts that carry identifying detail.
• Public professional profiles: keep what serves you; remove personal contact details that do not need to be there.
• Other people's posts: ask them. Most people take a tagged photo down when asked, and there is no mechanism that beats asking.

Step 6 — Cut the supply

Removal without this is a treadmill.

• Use one email address for signups, separate from your personal and financial accounts.
• Consider email aliases, which most password managers and Apple and Google accounts now offer.
• Stop giving your real phone number to loyalty schemes, forms and shops.
• Decline optional fields. Most forms only need a fraction of what they ask.
• Opt out of marketing data sharing where a company offers it.
• Freeze your credit if you are in the US — it is free, does not affect your credit score, and blocks the most damaging use of leaked identity data.
• Reduce app permissions, especially location. How to stop apps tracking your location covers that in detail.

Step 7 — Repeat

Brokers rebuild. New public records, property filings, voter rolls, marketing lists and fresh breaches all feed the same profiles back into existence, and a removal only reflects the data a company held on the day you asked.

Every three to six months: re-run your name searches, re-check the sites you opted out of, and clear anything new. It takes twenty minutes once the first pass is done.

Setting a Google Alert for your own name catches new pages without you having to look.

Are removal services worth paying for?

They do what you can do yourself, on a schedule, without you having to remember. That is a real service — it is just not a capability you lack.

Reasonable if: you value the time more than the money, and you want the quarterly re-checks handled.

Be careful about: services that promise complete removal, ones that will not list which brokers they cover, and ones that require more personal data than the opt-outs themselves would.

What cannot be removed

Being clear about this saves a lot of frustration:

• Public records — property, court, marriage, voter and business filings
• News articles, including archived ones
• Content others posted, unless they agree to remove it or it breaks a platform rule
• Anything already copied to sites that ignore requests
• Archives such as the Wayback Machine, in most cases

For these, the realistic goal is to push them down the results rather than delete them — and to make sure the details that enable impersonation are not among what remains.

Key takeaways

• Complete removal is impossible; prioritised removal is very achievable.
• Address, phone number, date of birth and identity numbers come first.
• Google's Results about you removes search listings quickly, but not the underlying pages.
• People-search sites and data brokers are the main source, and each has an opt-out.
• California's DROP covers over 500 registered brokers with one free request.
• Old accounts are future breaches — close them rather than abandoning them.
• Schedule a repeat every three to six months, because profiles rebuild.

Data brokers explains who is holding this material and why, and how to protect your personal information online covers keeping new information from being collected in the first place.