Type your own name into a search engine and you will probably find your address, your age, your phone number, your relatives and a map of your street, published by a company you have never heard of and never gave permission to. About two hours of free work removes you from most of those sites. This page is the exact list, in priority order, with an honest account of what it does not fix.
There are two different systems holding data about you, and only one of them has an opt-out. Commercial data brokers sell your information for money, so consumer law gives you leverage over them and everything below works. Government surveillance systems, including the Flock plate readers on Apex streets, have no consumer relationship and no opt-out at all. Doing everything on this page will make you much harder to find online. It will not remove a single plate read from a police database. More on that split at the bottom.
Two different kinds of company, and the difference matters because they respond to different pressure.
People-search sites are the ones you have seen. They publish a page with your name on it, showing current and former addresses, phone numbers, age, relatives, and sometimes a satellite photo of your house, all assembled from public records and sold to anyone with a credit card. These are the sites that make you feel exposed, and they are the ones with real opt-out forms because their business model depends on staying just inside consumer protection law.
Large-scale aggregators sell to businesses, not to strangers, so there is no public page with your name on it. They matter anyway, because they are the wholesale supply. The Electronic Frontier Foundation described Acxiom as a broker that collects roughly 1,500 data points per person on more than 700 million people. Opting out of the retail sites while leaving the wholesalers alone is why data comes back.
Both categories buy from each other and both re-scrape public records continuously. That is the single most important thing to understand before you start: removal is maintenance, not a one-time fix. Listings typically return within three to four months.
If you do nothing else, do these four things. They deliver most of the available benefit and they are all free.
Eight forms remove you from roughly twenty sites, because several of the biggest names are owned by the same parent companies. The table is below. Do these in one sitting with a coffee. Keep a note of the date you filed each one, because you will need it in three months.
A browser setting that automatically tells every site you visit not to sell or share your data. In about a dozen states that signal is legally binding. It is a five minute change that keeps working forever. How to switch it on.
A credit freeze at all three bureaus is the single most effective anti-fraud step available, it is free, and it is unrelated to whether you can delete broker data. Freeze at Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Then stop the prescreened credit and insurance offers that leak your address to mailers, at optoutprescreen.com or 1-888-567-8688, a joint line run by the bureaus.
This is the step everyone skips and it is the one that decides whether any of the work above lasted. Title it “recheck data brokers” and repeat it every three months. When it fires, search your own name and re-file wherever you reappear.
Priority order. The top four are the ones that cover multiple sites per request, so they are the best use of your first half hour.
| Site or family | Where to go | What it needs | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| PeopleConnect Intelius, TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate, US Search, ZabaSearch, Classmates and about 15 more | suppression.peopleconnect.us | Full legal name, date of birth, email confirmation. No photo ID. | 10 to 15 min Best value |
| BeenVerified plus PeopleLooker, NeighborWho, Ownerly | beenverified.com/app/optout/search | Find your record, confirm by email | 1 to 3 business days |
| Whitepages also covers 411.com | whitepages.com/suppression-requests | Phone or SMS verification | About 24 hours |
| Spokeo | spokeo.com/optout | Paste your profile URL, confirm by email | 24 to 72 hours. Reappears every 3 to 4 months. |
| TruePeopleSearch | Opt-out page, then “Remove This Record” | CAPTCHA and email | 24 to 48 hours |
| FastPeopleSearch | Opt-out form on the site | CAPTCHA and email | About 48 hours, despite the 24 hour claim |
| Radaris plus a network of subsidiary domains such as Centeda | radaris.com/control/privacy | Requires creating an account | About 30 days Fights back |
| MyLife | Call (888) 704-1900 | Phone only. There is no working web form. | Up to 10 days Phone only |
Others with their own separate forms, worth doing in stage two: PeopleFinders, Nuwber, PeekYou, USPhoneBook, ClustrMaps, Addresses.com, SearchPeopleFree, ThatsThem, Dataveria.
Global Privacy Control is a signal your browser sends to every site you visit, saying do not sell or share my personal information. It was built by a group including the EFF, Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, Consumer Reports and the W3C, and in the states that recognise universal opt-out signals it is a legally binding request, not a polite one. California has already brought enforcement against a retailer for ignoring it.
You are mostly already covered. Brave sends the signal by default, Firefox has supported it since version 120, and DuckDuckGo sends it natively. Confirm it is on in your privacy settings.
None of the three sends the signal on its own. Install Privacy Badger from the EFF, or OptMeowt, and the signal goes out on every page load. California’s AB 566, signed in October 2025 and effective January 1, 2027, will be the first US law requiring browsers themselves to build this in, so the extension is a stopgap for about a year.
No public profile page, so nothing here will change what a search engine shows. Do it anyway, because these are the wholesalers that resupply the retail sites after you opt out.
| Company | What they hold | Opt-out |
|---|---|---|
| Acxiom | One of the largest marketing brokers in the world | acxiom.com/optout or 1-877-774-2094. Takes about two weeks. |
| LiveRamp Acxiom’s former identity arm, now separate | Cross-site identity graph | liveramp.com/opt_out |
| Epsilon owned by Publicis | Household purchase and marketing data | Email optout@epsilon.com with your full name and mailing address, use its Your Privacy Choices form, or call (866) 267-3861 |
| LexisNexis Risk Solutions | Risk and identity data, regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act | consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/opt. See the caveats. |
| CoreLogic now branded Cotality | Property and mortgage records | Email privacy@corelogic.com. A separate mail-in form covers Teletrack prescreen offers. |
| Red Violet / IDI | Identity intelligence covering close to every US adult | ididata.com/opt-out-policy. Discretionary, aimed mainly at people at risk of harm. State-law requests go through its Do Not Sell page. |
| Infutor part of Verisk and Data Axle | Business-to-business record enrichment | Each has its own form on its site |
Oracle Data Cloud appears on most older guides. Oracle wound down and exited that business in 2022, so it is no longer the ad-data broker it was and there is nothing to opt out of.
LexisNexis will suppress your data from some products. It states plainly that it will not suppress data from products regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act or from products sold to law enforcement. The broad public-safety suppression requires documentation: a supervisor’s letter if you are a public official, or a protective order, police report or shelter letter if you are at risk. Anyone can use the narrower direct-marketing opt-out and the prescreen credit and insurance opt-out without proving anything. You can also request a full file disclosure to see what they hold on you, which is worth doing once.
Widely described in the privacy community as a dishonorable data broker. It requires you to create an account to remove yourself, resists requests, spreads the same data across subsidiary domains, and re-lists months later. Even paid removal services struggle with it. Expect to file more than once and to chase individual URLs.
Effectively phone-only at (888) 704-1900, with a stated processing time of up to ten days. Budget a real phone call.
Roughly nineteen or twenty states now have comprehensive privacy laws granting residents a right to demand deletion. North Carolina is not one of them. That is the honest position for Apex readers: bills have been filed, none has passed, and there is no state deletion right to invoke here. What you have instead is the voluntary opt-out process above, plus two useful facts.
First, most brokers do not sort by state. Nearly every form listed on this page is open to anyone who fills it in. Companies build one compliance workflow rather than nineteen, so North Carolina residents get the benefit of California and Colorado law in practice, just without the right to complain to a regulator when it is ignored.
Second, the state registries are free intelligence. California, Texas, Oregon and Vermont require data brokers to register publicly, and Connecticut’s registry starts January 1, 2027. Those lists are the closest thing that exists to a master directory of who is selling your information. A joint Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and EFF analysis in April 2025 found 750 companies registered in at least one state, with hundreds registered in one but not others, including 291 that did not register in California. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse consolidates the registries into one searchable list, and it is a good place to look up a broker you have never heard of.
California’s Delete Act created the first genuine one-stop deletion tool in the United States. Since January 1, 2026, a California resident can submit one free request at consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov that reaches every registered broker in the state, more than 500 of them. Brokers were required to start honoring it on August 1, 2026, must check the queue at least every 45 days, and face penalties of $200 per consumer per day for failing to process. More than 345,000 requests had been submitted as of early August 2026, and the state has already fined multiple brokers for failing to register at all.
It is for California residents only, and the state itself says it will not erase all personal information that exists online. It matters here as the model. If you want a single form instead of twenty, this is what that looks like, and it exists because a legislature built it rather than because brokers volunteered.
One note on Consumer Reports’ Permission Slip app, which older guides recommend as an independent free option. Consumer Reports transferred the app to DeleteMe in 2025, and DeleteMe assumed full operations around July of that year. It is still free and it still files requests as your authorized agent, but it is now run by a company that sells removal subscriptions rather than by a nonprofit.
Paid services act as your authorized agent, work through a fixed list of brokers, and re-file on a cycle of roughly 30 to 90 days because the data returns. They are recurring subscriptions, and their real product is not access, it is not having to remember.
The strongest independent evidence is Consumer Reports’ 2024 study, which put 32 volunteers and seven services against 13 people-search sites over four months. The headline finding is not flattering to the industry: doing it manually yourself was the most effective method at roughly 70 percent removal, and only about 35 percent of exposed data stayed off across all services tested. A 2025 academic study reached the same range. Optery, which Consumer Reports ranked first, summarised the spread as performing three percentage points better than runner-up EasyOptOuts and 41 points better than DeleteMe. DeleteMe’s own published figures say about 42 percent of its customers see data return within six months.
| Service | Roughly | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Optery | Free basic tier, then $39 to $249 a year | Ranked first in the Consumer Reports test, broadest coverage, screenshot verification so you can see the work. The free scan alone is worth running to see what is out there. |
| EasyOptOuts | About $20 a year | Near-identical effectiveness to Optery in testing at a fraction of the price. Bare bones, no dashboard theatre. Best value in the category. |
| Incogni from Surfshark | About $96 a year | Wide broker list, re-removal every 60 to 90 days, independent assurance report. No free scan, so you buy before you see. |
| DeleteMe | About $129 a year | The most marketed and the weakest performer in the Consumer Reports test at roughly 27 percent. Human-assisted, which helps with the awkward brokers, but the price does not match the measured result. |
| Onerep, and anything built on it | Avoid In March 2024 KrebsOnSecurity reported that Onerep’s founder and chief executive had launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active broker called Nuwber. He confirmed retaining ownership of Nuwber while stating there is no crossover with Onerep. Mozilla ended its partnership and shut down Monitor Plus on December 17, 2025. Whatever the technical firewall, paying a people-search founder to remove you from people-search sites is not a structure to trust. | |
Everything above assumes ordinary privacy hygiene. If you are a survivor of stalking or domestic violence, a journalist, an election worker, a public official or anyone with a specific reason to believe someone is looking for you, the calculus changes and the order changes with it.
This is the part that connects to the rest of this site, and it is the reason we wrote the page.
Everything above works because data brokers are commercial companies selling a product. You are a consumer, consumer law applies, and a company that wants to keep operating will honor an opt-out. That relationship is the whole source of your leverage.
Automated license plate readers have none of it. There is no consumer relationship, no account, no privacy dashboard, no form. Flock Safety operates more than 120,000 plate reader cameras under contracts with roughly 7,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, according to the Baltimore Sun in August 2026. The ACLU’s Get The Flock Out campaign counts 80,000 to 100,000 devices running more than 20 billion scans a month. Independent DeFlock mapping had verified 95,923 cameras as of July 17, 2026. Flock itself confirms there is no consumer opt-out, because you were never its customer. Its customer is your police department.
So a plate read of your car sits in a database you cannot access, cannot correct and cannot delete, generated by a camera you did not consent to, searchable by agencies you have never heard of. In Apex, records the Town produced show at least 4,506 searches through that network, and 9,700 searches by federal accounts that reached Apex cameras between January and April 2026. No amount of personal privacy work touches any of it.
Individual removal reduces your commercial exposure. It does nothing about government surveillance infrastructure, which changes through policy and law, not personal settings.
If being tracked by plate readers is what actually worries you, the two hours you would spend on opt-out forms buys more at a Council meeting. Email Council · Speak for three minutes · See where each member stands
URLs and timelines change constantly. Opt-out flows, required fields and even company ownership shift every few months, so verify against the broker’s current page rather than trusting this table if something does not match. Broker counts quoted anywhere, including here, vary by source and are partly marketing.
The effectiveness evidence is thinner than it should be. The main independent field test is Consumer Reports’ 2024 study, with fieldwork done in 2023, corroborated by one academic study in 2025. Vendors dispute the methodology and publish their own numbers. Treat vendor claims, including the favourable ones quoted above, with more scepticism than the independent findings.
California’s DROP is still early. Broker processing only became mandatory on August 1, 2026, and independent third-party compliance audits do not begin until January 1, 2028. Its real-world effectiveness is not yet proven.
This is general information, not legal advice. DeFlock Apex has no financial relationship with any service named on this page, paid or free, and receives nothing if you sign up for any of them.
DeFlock Apex is a resident-led project. If a link on this page has broken or a form has changed, tell us and we will fix it: contact@deflockapex.org
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