Take Control of Your Online Presence

Removing your personal information online is not a one-time exercise. Google’s enhanced “Results About You” tool highlights how often private details remain—or reappear—across the web, even after prior removal efforts.

The tool commonly surfaces home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, and relatives’ names posted on people-search websites. Google now sends alerts when new instances are found, making it easier to monitor your exposure over time.

This matters because widely accessible personal data can lead to unwanted solicitations, fraud, impersonation, and identity theft. Much of this information originates from public records and routine activities such as buying a home, registering to vote, or signing up for subscriptions. Data brokers collect and combine these sources, build detailed profiles, and resell them across hundreds of sites.

To begin, search your name along with your city or state, and use Google’s scanner at myactivity.google.com under “Results About You” to request removal of links from search results. Keep in mind that this step removes visibility in Google, not the underlying data itself.

To address the source, you must opt out directly from data brokers. Doing this manually can be time-consuming, as each site has its own process and timelines. Services such as DeleteMe and Optery automate this work by identifying where your information appears, submitting opt-out requests, and rechecking periodically since data often reappears. Some providers, like Aura, also bundle identity theft protection and security tools.

Completely disappearing from the internet isn’t realistic for most people—and it doesn’t need to be the goal. The more practical objective is awareness and control. By checking periodically, opting out where possible, and being intentional about what information you share going forward, you can meaningfully reduce how visible and accessible your personal data is.

Small adjustments help: using a secondary email for sign-ups, limiting what’s publicly shared on social media, and taking advantage of privacy settings already available to you. Over time, these habits make managing your digital footprint far more manageable—and far less stressful.