Intelius is one of the largest people-search platforms on the internet. It aggregates public records, social media data, and other sources to build detailed profiles that include your name, address, phone number, email, relatives, and more. If you have found your personal information on Intelius and want it removed, the opt-out process exists and it works. Here is how to do it.
Why Intelius Matters More Than You Think
Intelius is not just one site. It owns and operates several subsidiary people-search brands, including US Search, iSearch, and Zabasearch. When you opt out of Intelius, your removal should cascade to these related properties as well. This makes Intelius one of the highest-leverage opt-outs you can do because a single request can clean up your data across multiple sites.
Intelius profiles rank well on Google, especially for less common names. Even for common names, having an Intelius profile means anyone who searches for you and clicks through will find your address, phone number, and a list of your relatives. That is more information than most people are comfortable having publicly available.
The Opt-Out Process
Go to the Intelius opt-out page at intelius.com/opt-out. You will need to search for your record first to locate your specific profile. Once you find yourself, select your listing and submit the opt-out request. Intelius will send a confirmation email to the address you provide. Click the confirmation link to complete the process.
Processing typically takes up to 72 hours, though in our experience it is often faster. After the opt-out is processed, search for yourself on Intelius again to confirm the removal. Also check the subsidiary sites to make sure the cascade worked.
After Intelius
Removing yourself from Intelius is an important step, but it is just one piece of a larger puzzle. Your information likely appears on dozens of other people-search and data broker sites. We have written removal guides for BeenVerified, Whitepages, TruePeopleSearch, and FastPeopleSearch as well. For a comprehensive approach to removing personal data from the internet, working through all of these sites will give you the best results.
Re-Listing Prevention
One frustration with people-search opt-outs is that your information can reappear over time. These sites continuously scrape public records and other data sources, and new data imports can recreate your profile. Plan to re-check Intelius and the other major people-search sites every few months. If you find yourself re-listed, repeat the opt-out process. It is annoying, but each removal gets easier because you already know the steps.
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
- Remove from BeenVerified
- Remove from Whitepages
- Remove from TruePeopleSearch
- Content Removal Services
The Bigger Picture on People-Search Data
Intelius isn't an outlier. The Federal Trade Commission documented how data brokers collect and sell personal information with almost no direct relationship to the people they profile, a problem the agency flagged as far back as its 2014 data brokers report. That report counted more than 200 distinct broker companies operating in the United States at the time. The number has grown considerably since. The FTC's broader privacy and security guidance recommends limiting the personal information you make publicly available in the first place, which is exactly why opting out of sites like Intelius matters before a problem surfaces, not after.
Public sentiment backs that up. A 2019 Pew Research study found that 79 percent of Americans were concerned about how companies use their data, yet most had no idea how many sites held their records or how to remove them. That gap between concern and action is exactly what makes people-search profiles so persistent. EPIC has tracked this problem in depth, and their data broker issue page remains one of the clearest public summaries of how these companies operate and why federal oversight has moved slowly.
Intelius is one of roughly 500 data broker and people-search sites that Privacy Rights Clearinghouse tracks. Their opt-out directory is a useful companion resource once you've finished with Intelius and its subsidiaries and are ready to work through the broader list. State-level regulation is catching up, too. The IAPP has published solid analysis on what CCPA and GDPR mean for data brokers specifically, and those frameworks are expanding the formal channels available to consumers who want removal, especially in California and the EU.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A Denver-based family medicine physician found her home address and personal cell number on Intelius after a patient she'd discharged sent a series of unsettling messages. Her profile was ranking on the first page of Google for her full name plus her neighborhood. She completed the Intelius opt-out in about eight minutes, received the confirmation email immediately, and saw the profile deindex from Google within five days. She then worked through the Zabasearch and US Search subsidiaries manually because the cascade had only partially applied to those properties.
An early-stage SaaS founder in Austin was preparing for a seed fundraising round and discovered that his Intelius profile listed a 2017 civil court judgment from a business dispute that had been resolved. Investors were finding it during due diligence. He submitted the Intelius opt-out and simultaneously filed a CCPA deletion request citing the stale and misleading nature of the record. The profile was gone within 48 hours. He also flagged the same record on three other data broker sites we identified during a broader audit, and the fundraising conversation moved forward without the distraction.
By the Numbers
The scope of the people-search industry is worth understanding before you treat an Intelius opt-out as a one-and-done task. The FTC's 2014 data brokers report identified 9 data broker companies that, among them, held more than 3,000 data segments on nearly every American adult. That was a decade ago, and the industry has expanded considerably since. The International Association of Privacy Professionals has noted that California's CCPA, which took effect in 2020, gave state residents the first broadly enforceable opt-out rights against data brokers in the United States. Even so, compliance audits in 2022 found that many smaller broker sites still processed deletion requests inconsistently, which is why confirming removals manually remains necessary.
Consumer awareness of the problem keeps rising, but action rates stay low. The 2019 Pew Research study that found 79 percent of Americans worried about company data use also found that only 9 percent of those same respondents said they had read a privacy policy in full before agreeing to terms. That gap explains why profiles on sites like Intelius persist: the data flows in automatically through public record scrapes, but removal requires deliberate human steps. The FTC's personal information security guidance specifically calls out people-search sites as a category where consumers should actively monitor their exposure, not wait for a problem to appear. Monitoring makes sense because Intelius updates its database on a rolling basis. One study from the privacy research community estimated that re-listing can occur within 90 days of a successful opt-out when a new public records scrape pulls in a fresh address or phone number.
If you're thinking about your situation right now, those numbers have a practical implication. A single opt-out buys you time, not permanent removal. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse opt-out directory tracks more than 500 data broker and people-search sites as of its most recent update, and Intelius and its subsidiaries account for just a handful of them. Working through the full list is time-consuming, but the effort scales: once you've done Intelius, the process on every other site follows a nearly identical pattern. Setting a quarterly calendar reminder to recheck your top five highest-traffic people-search listings is the single most effective habit we've seen clients build after their initial round of removals.
Another Client Situation
A licensed clinical social worker based in Portland, Oregon came to us in early 2024 after a client she had recently discharged began leaving hostile reviews and comments that referenced her home neighborhood by name. She hadn't publicized her home address anywhere, but an Intelius profile tied her name directly to a residential street in a Portland suburb, along with the names of two family members listed as relatives. Within four weeks of engaging our removal services, we had confirmed opt-outs on Intelius and all three of its subsidiary properties, plus removals on seven additional people-search sites that were surfacing in the top 20 Google results for her name. Six months later, a follow-up audit found that only one site had re-listed her, and it was addressed in the same audit cycle. She reported that the situation with the former client de-escalated significantly once the home neighborhood information stopped appearing in search results.