It’s an incredibly arduous, tedious, and deliberately unfriendly process, but you can, in fact, opt out of the data-brokers that are most commonly used to doxx people, uncovering their home addresses, work details, and so on (but beware, you have to do this on a more-or-less monthly basis to stay out of their databases).
Ken Gagne collects 13 brokerages that represent the highest-profile sources of personal information and provides details of what to expect when you opt out of them. Rich people hire “reputation management” companies to opt out of these services for them every month. Regular slobs like you and me have to spend a day a month doing it for ourselves, and chase down the brokers’ affiliates and opt out of them one-by-one, too.
Up until recently, I had a listed landline. I now pay my phone company a monthly fee for an unlisted number, but it still showed up in places like Whitepages.
To find out if yours does, too, enter your name and address in the search box on the Whitepages home page. If you appear in the results, click the “Claim/Edit” button. Create an account and verify your email address. Whitepages will then ring the number listed in your profile. Just answer the phone and press “1.” You can then choose to unlist specific numbers in your profile, or hide the entire profile, via your profile’s Privacy settings.
Note: While Whitepages did honor my opt-out request, my record continued to show up in its search results via sponsored partners, such as BeenVerified.com, PeopleSmart.com and InstantCheckmate.com. Many of these sites have opt-out forms similar to the ones I’ve shared here; if you’re truly committed to delisting yourself as completely as possible, you’ll need to chase down these rabbit holes as you encounter them.
Doxxing defense: Remove your personal info from data brokers [Ken Gagne/Computerworld]
(Image: ED)