An expanding market for personal information has prompted growing concern about privacy. Anyone can run a simple search for your name, city, and state to reveal a number of data mining websites eager to share and sell your private data. Such easy and immediate access to personal information poses a number of privacy and security risks.
In fact, the FTC just announced that Spokeo.com is to pay a hefty settlement in response to the FTC charges alleged against the company. According to the FTC, Spokeo was in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act for marketing consumer profiles as a resource for employment screening and background checks, while failing to ensure all information provided was accurate. The icing on the cake? That Spokeo employees were writing fake endorsements about the site online.
Don’t want Spokeo selling your personal information? The first step in protecting and controlling your personal data is to remove any existing info about you.
Follow these step-by-step instructions to remove your personal info from Spokeo:
1. Go to Spokeo.com. Type your full name in the search box, along with the city and state where you currently live, and click “Search.”
2. Spokeo will generate a list of results. Search through these results for your listing, and click on the appropriate listing to expand it and view more details. Note that you will probably have more than one listing.
3. Each listing page displays some of your personal information and offers the “Full Results” for a price. Copy the URL of your listing page by clicking in your browser’s web address bar, highlighting the URL text, and clicking “copy” from the right-click menu.
Copy the URL from the top of the page where you find your information listed.
4. Go to Spokeo’s opt out page in a new browser window or tab. Scroll down and fill out the following in the specified fields:
- Paste the URL of your listing by clicking “paste” from the right-click menu.
- Enter your email address. Spokeo will send a confirmation email to that address, which contains a link you must click to confirm the removal of the listing. (Don’t want to provide your own email address? Go to FakeMailGenerator.com. Use the email address in the top right corner of the screen and keep the page open to receive your email.)
- Enter the CAPTCHA code
5. Click “Remove this listing.” You’ll receive the message “Please check your email for further instructions.”
6. Go to the email address you provided and open the email from Spokeo. Click “click here” to confirm removal.
7. You’re done! Your information will be removed from Spokeo.com shortly. Sometimes it comes down immediately, but it can take up to 24 hours.
Now repeat steps 1-7 for all of your previous addresses and variations of your name. Spokeo tends to post multiple listings, so you’ll likely find yourself on their website more than once.
Note that Spokeo only allows 5 removal requests per email address and IP address. If you receive a message that says “In order to prevent abuse, we must limit the frequency of automated privacy requests,” use an email address from FakeMailGenerator.com and use a free proxy server like TurboHide to access Spokeo’s privacy page and process more removal requests.
Be sure to go back and check for your information periodically. Spokeo is always collecting new public records and information about you, and inevitably your name will pop back up on their website at some point.
Sound like too much work? Check out our DeleteMe service, which removes personal information from Spokeo along with 17 other people search sites, and we’ll do it all for you!
I TRIED THIS AND GOT: We could not locate a directory listing for the URL provided.
I MAY NO LONGER BE IN A PHONE BOOK FOR A PARTICULAR ADDRESS, BUT IT IS STILL COMING UP IN SPOKEO THAT I WAS LIVED THERE, WHICH DEFEATS THE PURPOSE OVERALL OF NOT SHOWING WHERE I LIVED! HOW TO GET RID OF THIS?!
I’m not sure what you mean. When did you get the following message: “We could not locate a directory listing for the URL provided”?
I grabbed my Spokeo listing URL from one browser (copied it from Google Chrome) and opened Internet Explorer and typed in [www.spokeo.com/optout] and pasted the URL with my name and state into the space provided, typed in my email and the captcha and immediately received an email that had a link I clicked which removed my listing. You may have to do this several times, but the page confirming you are removed provides the form to remove more entries. Good luck!
Not peoples bussiness where I live, this website almost put me in danger.
Been trying to remove my name without success. I am doing everything that it says to do, but I do not get a confirmation email.
Just did all described above and successfully deleted all info for me and my wife. Thanks
Be sure to search all previous addresses. They’re all there going back 20 years+
invasion of privacy ! No ones business where I live or work !
You’re confused: invasion of privacy refers to a government agent/agency taking private information about your without a warrant or consent.
This is commercial data collection. Congress has failed to pass any laws to limit or restrict this type of activity.
I don’t like that these companies are doing this, but they are not really violating any laws that we have.
Both you and I are in the minority, by the way: the bulk of Americans are apparently happy to share everything with the entire world – look at facebook.
I removed all my information from spokeo as per above last year but when google my name I still show up with a spokeo listing on the google result that shows where I live and have lived, my age etc… When click on the link I go to the Spokeo website but my information is not there. It’s probably a directory listing in spokeo, since this contains so much private information , how do I remove this last trail ?
Here’s a solution for you: if you ever see a link in Google that needs updating (in other words, you’ve removed or changed content on the publisher’s site, but Google’s search results still reflect the old content), you can use Google’s URL Removal Tool to fix it. Just go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals.
Note that you’ll need a Google account. Just hit the “New removal request” button, paste the link to the site that needs updating, and under “Reason,” select “The page has changed and Google’s cached version is out of date” from the drop-down menu. Then follow the directions on the page and “enter a word that has been entirely removed from the live page but is still present in the cached version.” Finally, submit your request. Google will approve or deny it within about 48 hours. You can also view pending, approved, and denied removal requests.
Please remove my infomation now
I canceled my subscription, so why was my account charged $14.95 ?
worked great! thank you!