I Built a Privacy Tool Because I Was Tired of Being Listed
My wife was the one who started this. Not intentionally — she was just venting.
She was home with our toddler, juggling snacks and nap schedules and the general chaos of keeping a small human alive, and her phone would not stop buzzing. A text about a USPS package that "couldn't be delivered" — except she had not ordered anything. A call about her car's extended warranty from a number that looked local. Another text claiming she had an unpaid toll and needed to "pay now to avoid penalty" — she was visiting her mom in Florida with our toddler. Not exactly the time to be sorting real from fake. Then the really unsettling ones: a voicemail warning about "suspicious activity on your account" that sounded so much like a real person she almost called back, and robocalls where the voice had that uncanny AI-generated smoothness, like someone had trained a model to sound trustworthy. Multiple times a day, every day.
"Why do these people have my number?" she asked me one night. Not rhetorically. She genuinely wanted to know.
So I looked into it.
Down the rabbit hole
I Googled her name. Then I Googled mine. Within five minutes, I had found our full names, phone numbers, home address, email addresses, ages, and a list of our relatives on at least a dozen "people search" websites. Sites we had never heard of. Sites we had never signed up for.
Spokeo. BeenVerified. Whitepages. TruePeopleSearch. FastPeopleSearch. Each one had a slightly different version of our lives, all of it accurate enough to be unsettling. Our address. Our ages. Our family members by name.
That is where the spam was coming from. Data brokers scrape public records, buy commercial data, and aggregate everything into searchable profiles. Then they sell that data — in bulk — to telemarketers, lead generators, and anyone else willing to pay. Your phone number costs a fraction of a cent on the open market.
Her phone was not broken. The system was working exactly as designed. She was the product.
The opt-out nightmare
I decided to remove us from all of them. How hard could it be?
Extremely hard, as it turns out. Every site has a different opt-out process. Some have web forms. Some require email. One makes you call a phone number. Another asks you to upload a photo of your driver's license (I am not kidding).
I spent an entire Saturday afternoon working through opt-outs while my wife handled bedtime solo. Filling forms, sending emails, taking screenshots, tracking which ones I had done. It took about four hours for the two of us.
A month later, I checked again. Half of them had re-listed us.
That is when it clicked. These companies make money by listing you. The opt-out process is deliberately tedious because they do not want you to complete it. And even if you do, they re-list you from new data sources within weeks. The system is designed to exhaust you into giving up.
The "aha" moment
I am a small business owner and a father to a toddler. I do not have time to chase down data brokers. And sitting there at midnight, annoyed that I had just wasted a Saturday on something that would need to be redone in 30 days, I realized: everything I had just spent four hours doing could be automated.
Scanning sites for your info? Automated. Submitting opt-out forms? Automated. Sending legal deletion demands citing state privacy laws? Automated. Taking screenshots to prove it worked? Automated.
The only thing you need from the user is their name, city, state, and email. Maybe a phone number for better accuracy. That is it. Everything else is code.
I built the first version over a few late nights after the kid went to sleep. Tested it on myself and my wife. Watched the spam texts slow to a trickle over the next few weeks. And thought: other people need this.
What Unlisted is
Unlisted is the tool I wish had existed when my wife first complained about her phone. Here is what it does:
- Scans 18+ data broker sites for your personal information
- Shows you exactly what was found, with screenshots
- Submits removal requests and legal deletion demands automatically
- Takes before-and-after screenshots so you can verify the removal yourself
- Re-scans monthly and removes you again when brokers re-list you
What Unlisted is not
I did not build this to be another privacy company that asks you to trust them. Trust is earned, and I know how the privacy industry works — a lot of companies use "privacy" as a marketing hook while collecting data themselves.
So here is my commitment: Unlisted stores only what we need (name, city, state, phone, email). No street addresses. No tracking pixels. No analytics. No selling your data to anyone, ever. One-click account deletion at any time — we wipe everything.
We also include DIY instructions in every email. If you want to opt out yourself, we literally tell you how. Step by step. For every broker. We would rather help you do it for free than not help you at all.
What actually changed
The spam calls slowed down. That was the obvious part. The less obvious part: she started picking up her phone again when it rang. If something buzzed, it was usually real. Her mom. A friend. Something she actually signed up for.
Why it is cheap
Free scan. $0.99 for one-time removal. $9.99 per year for ongoing protection.
Other services charge $10 to $15 per month — $120 to $180 per year — for basically the same thing. I think that is absurd. Privacy should not be a luxury product. If I can automate 95% of the work, I can charge less. So I do.
I am not trying to build a billion-dollar company here. I am trying to solve a problem that was ruining my wife's afternoons and make sure nobody else has to waste a Saturday doing what a script can do in two minutes.
Try it
If your phone will not stop buzzing with spam, if you have ever Googled yourself and felt uncomfortable, if you just want to know who has your data — run a free scan. It takes 60 seconds. No credit card. No commitment. Just information.
And if you want us to make it all go away, that is what Unlisted is for. My wife does not get spam texts anymore. You should not have to either.