Erase yourself from the internet with Claude

Four stages, and only one of them is hard 💡

Find out who has you 🔎

1. 🧠 Open Claude with web search available. Any plan works here, Free included. You want it able to search the live web, because you are asking it to go and look at what is currently published.
2. 💡 Run the audit prompt below. Give it your name and the cities you have lived in. Do not paste your full street address, date of birth or any government ID number. You are asking what is already public, not adding to it.
3. 📄 Cross-check against the maintained list. The Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List is a volunteer-maintained directory of people-search sites with the exact opt-out route for each one. It is the single best reference on this and it is updated regularly. The entries marked with a flower are the fourteen the maintainer considers crucial.
4. 👩‍💻 Check your email in a breach. Run your address through Have I Been Pwned. It is free and it tells you which breaches your email turned up in, which explains a lot of the spam and tells you which passwords to change first.
5. 🌱 Search yourself properly. Search your name in quotes, then your name plus your suburb, then your name plus your phone number, in a private window so your own history does not skew it. Screenshot or save every result that shows personal detail. That list is your worklist.

Prompt 1: the audit 📋

Search the web and build me a removal worklist. My name is [full name, plus any maiden name or common misspelling], and I have lived in [city or suburb, state or country] and previously [any other cities].

Find the people-search and data-broker sites that publish personal details for people with my name in those places. For each one, give me: the site name, the exact URL of its opt-out or privacy-request page, what it requires from me to process a removal (an email address, a phone verification, a profile URL, or a photo ID), whether it is known to require solving a CAPTCHA, and roughly how long removals are reported to take. Put the ones with the widest reach and the easiest process at the top.

Only list sites you can actually verify exist right now with a working opt-out route, and give me the source you checked for each. Do not guess a URL from the pattern of other sites, and if you cannot confirm an opt-out page for a site, say so and mark it "route unconfirmed" instead of inventing one. Do not ask me for my street address, date of birth or any ID number at any point.

The one form that covers 500+ brokers 💡

If you are a California resident, this is by far the highest-leverage thing on this page. The state's DELETE Act created DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, run by the California Privacy Protection Agency. You submit one free request and every data broker on the state register has to delete your personal information and keep doing so.

1. 🧠 Open the consumer portal. Go to consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov. Background and the official explainer are at privacy.ca.gov/drop.
2. 📄 Submit the single request. Californians have been able to submit since 1 January 2026, and registered brokers began processing those deletion requests from 1 August 2026 (source).
3. 🔎 Use the register as a checklist. The same page hosts the data broker registry, which lists every broker that has registered with the state, what categories of information they collect and who they sell it to. It is a useful map even if you are not Californian, because most of these companies operate everywhere.

The removal routes that actually work 👩‍💻

These are the direct opt-out pages for the highest-reach people-search sites, taken from the maintained list and checked. Work top down. Most of them email you a confirmation link that you have to click before anything happens, so keep that tab open.

1. 🔗 Spokeo. Find your profile, copy its URL, then submit it at spokeo.com/optout with your email. Scroll down to the opt-out section on that page. You confirm by clicking the emailed link.
2. 🔗 Whitepages. Submit at whitepages.com/suppression_requests. This one verifies by automated phone call and a four-digit code, so it cannot be fully handed off. Whitepages also owns 411.com, so check there too.
3. 🔗 Radaris. Copy your profile URL and work through the forms at radaris.com/control-privacy. If your listing has no profile button, email customer-service@radaris.com with a screenshot instead, and expect to reply to their auto-response more than once.
4. 🔗 MyLife. Submit at mylife.com/privacyrequest, or email privacy@mylife.com with your name and profile link. This site pushes hard for a photo ID and a phone call. You do not have to give it your driver's licence to make a privacy request, and the email route is the one to try first.
5. 🔗 That's Them. Find your listing, then opt out at thatsthem.com/optout. Ignore the identity-protection upsell link on that page, it is a paid product.
6. 🔗 The PeopleConnect family, in one go. Intelius, Truthfinder, Instant Checkmate, US Search, Classmates and Zabasearch are all the same company. One suppression request at suppression.peopleconnect.us covers the group, which is the best return on five minutes on this whole page.
7. 🔗 Acxiom. This one is a marketing data giant rather than a people-search site, and it feeds a lot of others. US consumers opt out at acxiom.com/optout, and the same site has country portals for France, Italy and Spain.
8. 🔗 Everything else. BeenVerified, Nuwber, SmartBackgroundChecks, TruePeopleSearch, FastPeopleSearch, FamilyTreeNow, USPhoneBook and around forty more all have their own routes, each written out in the Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List. Open it in a tab and work down it.

Get it out of search results too 🔎

1. 🧠 Google Results about you. A free Google tool that scans for your phone number, home address and email in search results and lets you request removal of those results. Set it up at Results about you.
2. 💡 The personal-information removal request. For anything Results about you misses, Google's removal request tool covers contact details, doxxing content, non-consensual images and sites with exploitative removal practices.
3. ⚠️ Understand what this does. Search removal takes the result out of Google. The page itself still exists, and anyone with the direct link can still open it. That is why you do the broker opt-out first and the search removal second, not the other way round.

Hand the tedious part to Claude 👩‍💻

Doing forty forms by hand is why most people abandon this halfway. Two ways to split the work with Claude, and they suit different plans.

Prompt 2: the removal request letter 📋

Some brokers have no form, only a privacy email address. This drafts the message for those, and it is worth having because a request that cites the right law gets processed faster than "please take me down".

Write me a short, formal data-removal request I can email to a data broker. I am in [state or country]. The site is [site name] and my listing is at [profile URL if you have one].

Cite the legal basis that actually applies to where I live: California residents cite the CCPA right to delete, UK and EU residents cite the UKGDPR or GDPR right to erasure, Australians cite the Privacy Act. Ask them to delete my personal information, to confirm deletion in writing, to tell me which sources they obtained it from, and to suppress my record so it is not re-listed when their sources refresh. Give them a specific deadline consistent with the law I am relying on.

Keep it under 200 words, polite and unemotional, with no threats and no legal claims I cannot back up. Do not include my date of birth, government ID number or full street address in the body: use only my name, the profile URL and a contact email. Give me the version to send, and then a one-line follow-up I can send if they have not responded by the deadline.

Prompt 3: run it in Claude in Chrome 📋

1. 🧠 Install the extension. Details and the install link are at claude.com/chrome. It is Chrome on desktop only, and it needs a paid plan: Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise (source).
2. 💡 Set the permission mode. There are three: manually approve, where Claude pauses before each action, automatically approve, where it works continuously with safety checks running, and skip all approvals. For this job use manually approve the first time so you can watch what it types into a form with your name on it (source).
3. 🔗 Approve per site. On each new site you get a "new permissions required" prompt with allow this action, always allow actions on this site, or decline. Even on "always allow", downloads, sensitive data entry and authorisations still ask you every time.
4. 👩‍💻 Run the prompt below with your worklist pasted in, and stay at the desk for the first few sites.
5. 📧 Do the confirmation emails yourself. Almost every broker sends a verification link that has to be clicked before the removal is real. That step is yours, and it is the reason people think they opted out when they did not.

Here is my data-broker opt-out worklist: [paste the site names and opt-out URLs]. Work through it one site at a time in this browser, and keep a running table of progress.

For each site: open the opt-out page, find my listing using my name and city, copy the profile URL if the form needs one, and fill in the opt-out form using only the details I have given you here, which are my name, city and this contact email: [email you use for this]. Before you submit anything, show me exactly what you are about to send and wait for me to approve it.

Do not enter my date of birth, government ID, driver's licence or any payment details anywhere, and do not create an account on any of these sites. If a page needs a CAPTCHA, a phone verification, a login, or a document upload, stop and hand it back to me with a note saying what it wants. After each site, record in the table: site name, submitted or blocked, what it is waiting on, and the date. At the end, give me the finished table plus a short list of what I need to finish by hand.

The recheck, because they relist 🌱

1. 🧠 Schedule it in the extension. Claude in Chrome can run scheduled tasks at times you choose and keep working in the background while Chrome is open. Set a monthly run to reopen your worklist and check whether your listings are back (source).
2. 📄 Keep a tracker. A simple sheet with site, date submitted, date confirmed, date last checked. Without it you will redo sites you already did and miss the ones that quietly came back.
3. 💡 Diarise a proper resweep. Twice a year, run the audit prompt again from scratch. New brokers appear, old ones get bought, and a house move or a new business registration puts you straight back into the pipeline.

Recheck my data-broker removals. Here is my tracker: [paste the table]. For each site marked submitted or confirmed, search that site for my name in [city, state or country] and tell me whether a listing has reappeared.

Report back as three groups: still clear, reappeared and needs resubmitting, and could not check with the reason why. For anything that reappeared, give me the current opt-out URL again and note whether the process has changed since last time.

Do not resubmit anything without asking me first, and do not enter any personal detail beyond my name and city while searching.

Four extra layers most people skip 💡

If you are in the UK, the EU or Australia 🔗

Most of the big people-search sites are US-based, but you still have a statutory right to ask any organisation holding your data to delete it, and that right applies to them if they handle your information.

1. 🇬🇧 UK and EU. The right to erasure, often called the right to be forgotten, is explained plainly by the Information Commissioner's Office: your right to get your data deleted. Prompt 2 above will cite it for you.
2. 🇦🇺 Australia. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner sets out access and correction rights under the Privacy Act: your privacy rights. Australian rights are weaker on deletion than the GDPR, so lead with an access request and a correction request.
3. 📄 Worth reading either way. The Electronic Privacy Information Center's report Good Luck Opting Out documents the design tricks these companies use to make you give up partway. Knowing the pattern makes it much easier to push through.

What this cannot do, and when to pay ⚠️

Proof 🔗

Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List, the maintained directory of opt-out routes
California Privacy Protection Agency, data broker registry and DROP
DROP consumer portal
Google, Results about you
Get started with Claude in Chrome, plans and scheduled tasks
Claude in Chrome permissions guide
EPIC, Good Luck Opting Out