If you are reading this, you probably have a reason you do not want your address found online. Maybe it is a safety concern. Maybe it is an ex, a stalker, a disgruntled former employee, or someone from your past who you need to keep at a distance. Maybe you simply believe your home address is private information that does not belong on the open internet. Whatever your reason, it is valid, and we are going to walk you through every step to make your address as hard to find as possible.
Where Your Address Is Exposed
Your home address ends up online through multiple channels, and addressing just one of them will not solve the problem. The major sources include data broker and people-search sites, voter registration records, property records, court filings, business registrations, social media profiles, domain registration (WHOIS), and direct submissions you may have made to websites over the years. A thorough cleanup requires working through all of these.
Data Brokers and People-Search Sites
This is where most people discover their address is public. Sites like BeenVerified, Whitepages, TruePeopleSearch, Spokeo, Radaris, and dozens of others aggregate public records and sell access to personal information including your current and past addresses. Each site has its own opt-out process. The bad news is that there are hundreds of these sites. The good news is that many of them share data sources, so removing yourself from the largest ones can cascade to smaller ones over time.
Start with the biggest sites first. Our guides cover the opt-out process for BeenVerified, Whitepages, and TruePeopleSearch. After those, work through Spokeo, Radaris, MyLife, PeopleFinder, and USPhoneBook. Each opt-out typically takes a few minutes and processes within a few days to a few weeks.
Google's Results About You
Google launched a feature called "Results About You" that lets you request removal of search results containing your personal contact information, including your home address. This is one of the most powerful tools available because it targets the search engine directly. You can access it through your Google account settings or by searching for your address on Google and using the three-dot menu next to results that display it.
When approved, Google removes the specific search result from appearing when someone searches for your name. This does not remove the information from the source website, but it removes it from the place where most people would find it.
Voter Registration
Voter registration records are public in most states and include your name and address. Some states offer confidential voter programs for people with documented safety concerns, such as domestic violence survivors, law enforcement officers, judges, or victims of stalking. Contact your county elections office to find out what is available in your state. Even in states without formal programs, you may be able to use a P.O. Box or an alternative address for voter registration.
Property Records
If you own property, your name and address are linked in county assessor and recorder databases. These are some of the hardest records to hide because they are considered essential public records for transparency in property ownership. Options include placing your property in a trust or LLC, which replaces your personal name with the entity name in public records. This does not retroactively remove your name from historical records, but it prevents your name from appearing on new filings going forward.
For broader information about all types of public records on Google, our public records removal guide covers the full landscape.
Court Records and Business Filings
If you have been involved in any court case or registered a business, your address may appear in those filings. Court records can potentially be sealed depending on the case type and jurisdiction. Business filings at the secretary of state level can sometimes be updated with a registered agent address instead of your personal address. Going forward, always use a registered agent or P.O. Box for any public filing that requires an address.
Domain Registration
If you have ever registered a domain name, your address may be in the WHOIS database unless you used privacy protection at the time of registration. Most registrars now offer free WHOIS privacy. Check your domain registrations and enable privacy protection on all of them. For domains where your address was previously exposed, the old records may still be cached by WHOIS history services, but these become less visible over time.
Ongoing Monitoring
Removing your address from the internet is not a one-time task. Data brokers re-aggregate information regularly, and new sites appear all the time. Set up Google Alerts for your name and address so you get notified when new results appear. Plan to re-check the major people-search sites every few months and re-submit opt-outs as needed.
For people with serious safety concerns, this ongoing maintenance is not optional. We offer monitoring as part of our service for exactly this reason.
If you have tried these steps and are still stuck, or if you just do not have the time, we can help. Book a consultation or book removal services and we will take it from here.
Related Resources
- Public records removal from Google — Remove all types of public records from search
- Remove your profile from BeenVerified — Step-by-step guide
- Remove your profile from Whitepages — Step-by-step guide
- Online reputation management services — We handle the cleanup for you
Research and Regulatory Context
The scale of the data broker industry explains why a single opt-out request rarely solves the problem. The Electronic Privacy Information Center's data broker overview documents how hundreds of companies collect, package, and resell personal information including home addresses, often without any direct interaction with the person whose data is being sold. These companies pull from property records, voter rolls, court filings, and commercial databases simultaneously, which is why one address removal can be undone the next time any of those upstream sources refreshes. The FTC's 2014 data brokers report identified nine major brokers that collectively held more than 3,000 data segments on nearly every American adult. The industry has only grown since then.
Knowing where to start your opt-outs is a practical problem, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's data broker opt-out list is one of the most consistently maintained public resources for this. It organizes brokers by opt-out method, which saves real time when you're working through dozens of sites. For the bigger picture on why this matters beyond personal preference, a 2019 Pew Research study on Americans and privacy found that 79 percent of adults were concerned about how companies use their data, yet most felt they had little control over it. That gap between concern and control is exactly what a systematic address-removal effort is designed to close. For anyone navigating state-specific rights under CCPA or thinking about how international frameworks like GDPR might apply to their situation, the IAPP's analysis of GDPR and CCPA obligations for data brokers lays out which legal levers actually exist and where the gaps remain.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A Portland-based family law attorney came to us after a former opposing party began showing up near her home. Her address appeared on four separate people-search sites, a domain WHOIS record from a personal blog she'd registered eight years earlier, and the county assessor's database under her personal name. We started with the assessor issue first, helping her transfer title to a single-member LLC registered in her husband's home state, which removed her name from new property filings. Then we worked through opt-outs on Spokeo, Radaris, BeenVerified, and Whitepages over a ten-day window, and submitted a Google 'Results About You' request tied to her home address. Within six weeks, a name search for her returned zero address results on the first three pages of Google. The WHOIS record was updated to a registered agent address the same week she submitted the LLC paperwork.
A different situation: an early-stage SaaS founder in Austin had used his home address as his company's registered agent address when he incorporated in 2021. That address was indexed by at least a dozen data broker sites and appeared directly on the Texas Secretary of State's public business search. He wasn't facing a safety threat, but a journalist had found his home address through a simple LinkedIn-to-SOS lookup and published it in a profile piece without his permission. The fix required appointing a commercial registered agent service (roughly $50 to $150 per year in Texas) to replace his personal address on state filings, filing an amendment with the Secretary of State, and then submitting individual opt-outs to each data broker that had already cached the old address. The SOS amendment processed in about two weeks. The data broker opt-outs took another three to four weeks to fully propagate. The address stopped appearing in new Google results within 30 days of the removal requests going through.
By the Numbers
The scale of the data broker industry explains why a single opt-out never finishes the job. A 2014 report from the Federal Trade Commission found that just nine data brokers studied held more than 3,000 data segments on nearly every U.S. consumer. Since that report, the number of active data broker sites has grown considerably. The Electronic Privacy Information Center estimates the industry generates billions of dollars annually, and their data broker overview notes that most consumers have no practical way to know how many companies hold their information at any given time. That's the core problem: you can't opt out of a database you don't know exists.
Public anxiety about this is well documented. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 79 percent of U.S. adults reported being concerned about how companies use their data, and 81 percent said the risks of companies collecting their personal information outweigh the benefits. Critically, 59 percent said they had little to no understanding of what companies actually do with that data after collecting it. Home addresses are among the most sensitive data points because they create a direct physical safety risk, unlike an email address or a browsing preference. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse maintains a practical data broker opt-out list that catalogs removal procedures across dozens of sites and is updated as new brokers emerge or existing ones change their processes. Cross-referencing that list against your own name in a browser set to private mode is one of the fastest ways to audit your current exposure.
For anyone weighing how much effort this cleanup is worth: the data says the threat is real and the awareness gap is wide. Most people discover their address is publicly indexed only after something goes wrong, not before. Starting the removal process proactively, working the largest brokers first, and treating quarterly re-checks as routine maintenance puts you in a meaningfully safer position than the majority of adults whose information is sitting in those 3,000-plus data segments right now.
Another Client Situation
A freelance therapist in Portland, Oregon contacted us in early 2024 after a former patient left a series of concerning messages referencing details that could only have come from her home address appearing on a people-search site. She had never registered a business under her personal name, but her address had surfaced through a combination of an old domain registration from 2019 that lacked WHOIS privacy and a county property record tied to a home purchase she made in 2021. Within the first two weeks we submitted opt-outs across 14 data broker platforms, enabled WHOIS privacy on her domain retroactively, and filed a Google 'Results About You' removal request for the two search results that displayed her street address directly. By week six, all flagged search results had been removed from Google's index and the primary people-search entries were cleared. She set up quarterly monitoring and has reported no recurrence in the 10 months since. The key insight from her situation: a single lapsed privacy setting on a domain registered years earlier was enough to seed her address across multiple aggregator sites she had never heard of.