I Found My Personal Info on 18 Websites — Here's What I Did About It
A few months ago, I did something I had been putting off for years. I Googled my own name.
Not in a vain, "let me see if I am famous" kind of way. I did it because my wife had been getting three to five spam texts a day — fake USPS alerts, toll scams, AI-generated voicemails that sounded disturbingly real — and I wanted to figure out where these people were getting her number. So I searched her name first. Then I searched mine.
What I found made me angry.
The search results
Within five minutes, I had found my personal information listed on 18 different websites. Eighteen. Sites I had never heard of, never signed up for, never consented to.
Here is what they had:
- My full legal name
- My current home address and two previous addresses
- My cell phone number and an old landline
- My email addresses — including one I had not used in ten years
- My age and date of birth
- My wife's name
- Names of my relatives and their contact info
- An estimated income range (uncomfortably accurate)
- A satellite photo of my house
All of it free. Just sitting there, available to anyone who typed my name into a search engine. Sites like Spokeo, BeenVerified, Whitepages, TruePeopleSearch, FastPeopleSearch, Radaris — each one had some version of my life story, stitched together from public records, commercial data, and who knows what else.
The worst part was seeing my wife's name listed under "associated persons." Her information was right there too. Same phone number the scammers were texting.
The connection clicked
That is the moment I understood the spam problem. It is not random. It is not bad luck. There is a direct pipeline from these "people search" websites to your phone.
Data brokers collect your information from public records, commercial databases, and web scraping. They list it on their sites. Telemarketers and lead generators buy your data in bulk. They call you, text you, and sell your number to other buyers who do the same.
My wife was not getting spam texts because she clicked a bad link or signed up for something shady. She was getting them because her phone number was sitting on 18 websites, available to anyone willing to pay fractions of a cent for it.
What I did about it
I decided to remove us from all of them. I set aside a Saturday afternoon, opened a spreadsheet, and started working through each site one by one.
It was miserable.
Every single data broker has a different opt-out process. Some have web forms — find your listing, click remove, enter your email, confirm. Those are the good ones. Some make you email their privacy department and wait days for a response. One requires you to call a phone number and talk to a real person. Another — and I am not exaggerating — asks you to upload a photo of your driver's license to "verify your identity" before they will remove the data they collected without your consent. The irony was not lost on me.
The whole process took about four hours for the two of us. Four hours of copy-pasting URLs, filling out forms, sending emails, screenshotting everything. My wife handled bedtime solo while I sat at the kitchen table fighting for our privacy.
The part that really made me angry
A month later, I checked again. More than half the sites had re-listed us.
That is the part nobody tells you about data broker removal. It is not a one-time thing. These companies scrape new databases, buy new data sets, and rebuild your profile within 30 to 60 days. Your opt-out expires. Your data comes back. The whole cycle starts over.
I had wasted an entire Saturday on something that was already undone. And I realized that the opt-out process is deliberately designed to be this frustrating. Data brokers make money by listing you. They do not want you to successfully remove yourself. The tedious, inconsistent opt-out processes are a feature, not a bug.
So I automated it
I am a small business owner and a father to a small child. I solve problems for a living. And sitting there at midnight, staring at a spreadsheet full of opt-out submissions that were already being undone, I realized every step I had done by hand could be automated.
Scanning broker sites for your info? Code can do that. Submitting opt-out forms? Code. Sending legal deletion demands citing CCPA and state privacy laws? Code. Taking before-and-after screenshots to prove it worked? Code. Re-checking monthly and resubmitting when they re-list you? Code.
That is how Unlisted was born.
The results
After building and running Unlisted on my own data, the spam texts slowed to a trickle within a few weeks. Not zero — nothing completely eliminates it — but instead of three to five scam texts a day, my wife was getting maybe one or two a week. Most days, none.
That was enough to convince me other people needed this too.
The thing I did not expect was how much better it felt. Her phone buzzes now and it is actually worth looking at. Notifications mean something again.
What you should do right now
Seriously — go Google your own name. Add your city and state. Click through the first couple pages of results. You will probably find yourself on most of the same sites I did. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Then you have a choice. You can spend a Saturday manually opting out of all 18+ sites — we publish a free opt-out guide with step-by-step instructions for each one. Or you can let Unlisted handle it in about two minutes.
Free scan. 60 seconds. No credit card. Just see who has your data. What you do with that information is up to you — but at least you will know.