How to remove your home address from the internet

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You searched your name. Your address came up. Maybe your spouse's name, your kids' ages, a map of your street. Now you want it gone.

Good news: you can get most of it down. Bad news: "get it down" isn't one action. Your address doesn't live in one place. It lives in three, and each one needs a different fix.

This guide is the map. Read it once, then go handle each piece.

The three places your address lives

Data broker and people-search sites. Spokeo, Whitepages, TruePeopleSearch, BeenVerified, and roughly 200 more. These sites buy and scrape public records, then package your name, address, phone, relatives, and property value into a free or cheap report. This is the biggest chunk of your exposure and the fastest to fix.

Public records aggregators. County assessor sites, voter rolls, court dockets, property tax records. These are the source data the brokers scrape from. Some of it you can shield directly — through an Address Confidentiality Program if your state has one, or by filing specific exemption paperwork with the county. Some of it you can't remove, only make harder to link to you.

Old social media and forum posts. A check-in from 2013. A local Facebook group post with your street name in it. A Nextdoor comment. A property you tagged on Instagram. Nobody scrapes this systematically, but it's the piece that shows up when someone specifically googles you, not your address.

Three different problems. Three different fixes. Most people only handle the first one and think they're done.

Why deleting it once doesn't work

Here's the part that surprises people: opting out of a broker site isn't a one-time job.

Brokers don't manually maintain your listing. They run automated feeds that pull fresh data from public records every few months. Your opt-out removes today's listing. It doesn't stop the next feed from adding you back.

Spokeo re-lists every 4-6 months. MyLife can re-list in 30 days. TruePeopleSearch, about every 90 days. Multiply that by 200+ sites and you're not doing a project — you're doing a part-time job for the rest of your life.

That's the trap. Most people opt out once, feel good for a month, then forget about it. A year later they're fully back online and don't know it.

What to actually do about each one

Data brokers: opt out or automate it. For the nine biggest sites, you can do this yourself in an afternoon. Our guide on opting out of the major brokers walks through each one — the exact form, what it catches you on, how often it comes back. Past those nine, there are hundreds more, most of them smaller and more tedious to find.

Public records: know what's actually shieldable. If you're sworn law enforcement, corrections, or in some states a judge or prosecutor, you likely qualify for an Address Confidentiality Program or a records exemption tied to your job. That's a state-by-state filing, not a website opt-out — see privacy 101 on the job for how that process works and what it does and doesn't cover.

Old posts: manual cleanup, no shortcut. Search your own name and address together. Check Nextdoor, local Facebook groups, old check-ins, tagged photos. Delete what you can, ask admins to pull what you can't. This one has no automation. It's you, a search bar, and twenty minutes.

Where the free scan and full removal fit

If you want to know where you actually stand before doing anything, run a free scan. It checks the major broker sites against your name and tells you what's live right now. No point opting out of nine sites when only four of them have you.

From there you've got two paths. DIY the broker opt-outs yourself and repeat the cycle every few months, forever. Or let removal run in the background — we monitor the same sites, catch the re-listings, and file the opt-outs again without you lifting a finger.

The public records piece and the old-post cleanup are always yours to handle — no service files an ACP application or deletes your old Facebook check-ins for you. What we take off your plate is the part that never ends: the broker sites that keep coming back.

Your address belongs to you. Getting it back is a matter of covering all three fronts, not just the easy one.