How to delete yourself from the internet: What you can remove

To delete yourself from the internet as far as possible, remove information from the sites that publish it, submit separate requests to search engines, and use applicable privacy rights for data brokers. There is no single form that erases every copy, and many public records cannot simply be deleted.

Start with the exact pages exposing your details. The steps below explain which organization controls each copy and which request to send. This article covers the overall process; the linked guides provide the detailed forms and recheck procedures. California DROP applies only to eligible California residents. This is general information, not legal advice.

How to delete yourself from the internet: where to start

1. List the URLs showing your information. Record the site, exposed field and date. Prioritize details that create the most immediate concern.
2. Remove content you control. Edit or delete public profiles and use the account provider's privacy settings. Account deletion does not erase copies held by other sites.
3. Contact the publisher of each unwanted listing. For a people-search profile, use the site's official opt-out route.
4. Request search-result removal separately. Use the search engine's personal-information policy for qualifying live pages, or its outdated-content tool after a source changes. See the search-results removal guide.
5. Use privacy rights that apply where you live. California residents can send a request to registered brokers through DROP. See the California rights guide.
6. Save confirmations and check the original URLs again. Record what remains and why; use the reappearance checklist if a listing returns.

What can each removal request actually delete?

Four independent layers

A successful request has a boundary

Follow the owner of the copy. Success in one lane does not trigger the others.

1. 01

   Search index

   Each search engine

   →

   One engine hides a URL, sometimes only for searches with your name.

   Still outside this request: The live page, direct links and other engines.

2. 02

   People-search product

   The company showing the listing

   →

   That brand stops showing a matched profile in the covered product.

   Still outside this request: Other brands, other profiles, relatives’ reports and sources.

3. 03

   Registered-broker file

   Each registered broker · California DROP

   →

   Covered personal information is deleted once the broker matches you.

   Still outside this request: First-party, publicly available and exempt information.

4. 04

   Public record

   The office or court holding the record

   →

   Correction, confidentiality or sealing, if a route exists.

   Still outside this request: Downstream copies that already exist elsewhere.

A fifth action, account deletion, sits beside these layers rather than inside them. Closing your own social or retailer account changes data you control. It does not delete a people-search profile built from public records, and it does not take a URL out of Google.

The CCPA deletion right in Civil Code section 1798.105(a) covers what a business "has collected from the consumer"; SB 923 extends it to data bought from third parties from 1 January 2027.

The FTC also distinguishes a sale or sharing opt-out from a deletion. Stopping a sale is not the same as erasing a row. California's CCPA treats those as different rights (section 1798.105 for deletion, 1798.120 for opting out), and the rights guide keeps them separate. An "opted out" confirmation reports the second right.

Remove personal information from Google and other search engines

Google's Results about you lets you enter a name and contact details (nicknames, maiden names, several phones, addresses and emails) and see Search results that display them. You can ask to remove a result or mark it reviewed, and Google says notifications arrive within a few hours.

Government ID numbers, bank and card numbers, signature images, medical records, credentials and doxxing go through a separate policy, Remove my private info from Google Search.

Google also refuses some removals outright. It lists government and educational websites, online newspapers, and business websites among results it considers valuable to the public, and for those you won't find a “Remove result” action.

A result that shows your home address on a county site, or your name in a local article, can match the monitor and still have no removal. Google also excludes information you control, such as a social profile or personal blog you can edit yourself.

An approved request is an index change, and Google describes two sizes of it. Usually the URL stops appearing for any query. Sometimes Google applies a query-based removal: the URL stops appearing only "for search queries that contain your name," which it says happens when the page also carries public-interest content or other people's information.

A people-search page that lists relatives can fit that description, and then a search for your street address or phone number can still return it.

Either way, Google says "the info still exists on the source web page." Bing can still show it, an archive can still hold it, and someone with the URL does not need Google.

There is a second, narrower index tool: asking an engine to refresh a snippet when the source has already changed or vanished. Google's Refresh Outdated Content tool says it is not for you if "the information you want removed is still there."

That is the outdated-content path in How to remove personal information from search results, which also covers Bing. It fits a stale search card after the broker listing is gone, not a live page that still publishes the address.

Remove your listings from people-search sites

The FTC's people-search article is the clearest official description of this layer. People-search sites may buy data from other brokers, collect public social profiles, and compile government records into a report they sell. Most let you tell them to stop selling your information, though not always all of it (the FTC's example is sex-offender status).

After you opt out, changed public records can put information back on sale, and your details can remain in reports about relatives, neighbors, or associates. So “I opted out of Spokeo” is a statement about one company's product.

Read the company's terms for scope. PeopleConnect's Terms of Use (revised 24 November 2025) say a suppression applies when "a user searches you by name" across sites including TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate and Intelius, and that you may still appear "as a relative or associate in other individuals' reports, in phone or email reports." Spokeo's opt-out page, checked on 29 October 2026, says an opt-out "will not remove the data from its original source" and that each listing URL must be opted out separately. The opt-out directory lists current forms.

Broker filings show how much "opted out" can vary. In Oregon's data broker registry as of October 2026, 325 of 391 registered brokers, 83%, say you can opt out of all their activities, and 57 say you cannot. The answers are self-reported and unaudited.

A useful test after any product opt-out:

1. Search the same brand by the same identifier you used the first time.
2. Search it by the other identifier that originally found you: phone if you used name, name if you used phone.
3. Open any relative or associate report the FTC warning would predict.
4. Open the source the listing cited, if it cited one.

If step 1 is clean and step 2 is not, the request covered one search mode. If steps 1 and 2 are clean and step 3 is not, you removed your card and remained a field on someone else's.

If step 4 is still live, the problem is in layer 4 or on a first-party page, and another layer-2 opt-out will keep failing because that company does not control the source.

Do not submit a request pretending to be the relative. Ask the broker what route applies to an appearance in another person's report.

Use California DROP to request data-broker deletion

California's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform sends one consumer request to the active brokers on the state registry, and by law it is for California residents only. The Delete Act defines a data broker as a business that "knowingly collects and sells to third parties the personal information of a consumer with whom the business does not have a direct relationship" (Civil Code section 1798.99.80).

Companies are excluded to the extent the FCRA covers them, and a people-search result is not a consumer report: it cannot be used to screen a tenant, an employee, or a borrower.

The clocks are in section 1798.99.86. From 1 August 2026, each broker must access DROP at least once every 45 days and process requests within 45 days of receiving them; a request it cannot verify becomes an opt-out of sale or sharing.

After deleting, it must delete again at least every 45 days and must not sell new personal information about you. CalPrivacy says AB 883 shortens the cycle to 30 days from 1 January 2027.

How DROP works requires only name, date of birth and ZIP code; email, phone and device IDs can be added. Brokers match hashed identifiers, and the DROP FAQ warns that a name alone may not be enough, for the reasons in how DeepSearch matches people with the same name.

DROP's statuses show the same layering. Brokers report one of four codes defined in 11 CCR section 7614; DROP shows a fifth while it waits.

“Deleted” at layer 3 is compatible with a live Google result (layer 1), a listing at a brand that is not the registered entity you are thinking of (layer 2), and an unchanged assessor file (layer 4). It is also compatible with a people-search page that still shows publicly available data the statute lets a broker keep.

That last point is written into the definitions. Under Civil Code section 1798.140(v)(2), "personal information" excludes publicly available information, including information "lawfully made available from federal, state, or local government records." CalPrivacy's own examples of exempt data are public records like vehicle or real estate ownership or voting records.

The headline numbers make that misreading easy. By 12 October 2026 CalPrivacy reported more than 560,000 registered Californians and a typical user reported deleted by more than 150 brokers. In the 2026 registry, covering 2025, brokers say they complied in full with 98% of the deletion requests they resolved, a self-reported figure measured inside each broker's legal scope. The registry reading explains what such counts do and do not mean.

Processing began on 1 August 2026. A request submitted in January could still be pending in mid-August without anyone breaking the published rules: on 25 August CalPrivacy said about 25% of brokers had reported processing. Under these rules a first status can take months to arrive.

Can you remove your information from public records?

Public-record layer

The route leads back to the record-holder

Ask the office about the correction, confidentiality or sealing procedures available for that record.

• Property and deeds

  →

  County assessor or recorder

• Driving records

  →

  State motor-vehicle agency

• Voter registration

  →

  State or county elections office

• Criminal, civil and judgment records

  →

  The court that holds the file

• Birth, marriage, divorce and death

  →

  Vital-records office

• Professional licences

  →

  The licensing board

A people-search opt-out cannot unfile the underlying record.

The FTC lists the record types people-search sites compile: property; driving; voter registration; criminal, civil, and judgment files; birth, marriage, divorce, and death; professional licences. Each of those is held by an office that is not a data broker. Each has its own correction, amendment, or confidentiality process, if it has one at all.

A people-search opt-out cannot unfile a deed. The FTC says opting out "doesn't delete your information from public records," DROP lists publicly available data under what won't be deleted, and Google may decline requests for government pages it considers valuable to the public. The three consumer tools agree, independently, that layer 4 belongs to someone else.

That does not mean nothing can be done. It means the action has to match the record:

• a wrong address on a property record is a correction at the assessor or recorder, if the office allows it
• a safety-driven address is often an address-confidentiality or victim-protection programme, not a deletion
• a court record may have a sealing or redaction motion, which is a legal proceeding
• a professional-licence page is the licensing board's process

California shows how narrow those routes are. Safe at Home, the Secretary of State's programme for survivors of domestic violence, stalking and other listed harms, gives participants a substitute address that public agencies must accept, including on real property deeds under Government Code section 6209.5(a).

Its FAQ says the programme "is not able to delete information that already exists in public records" and is "not authorized to make demands of private organizations or businesses." For criminal records, the courts' self-help guide opens with "true expungement does not exist in California."

Do not assume deletion is available. Do not publish the record in a social thread while you wait; that creates a new layer-1 object. If you are in danger, a survivor advocate or appropriate professional should design the sequence. Generic self-searching can create its own trail.

Example: removing an address from a broker and Google

This example is fictional. Rosa Ibarra lives in Sacramento; the 2019 deed to her house is on file with the county recorder. A registered data broker we will call Brand A shows her address and phone and lists her mother as a relative, and her mother's report lists Rosa. Searching her name and city on Google returns the Brand A page with her address in the snippet.

On 10 August 2026 she sends three requests.

Each row moved its own layer. The wait follows the statute: a broker that downloaded its list on 1 August could first receive her request as late as 15 September and still be inside its 45-day processing window until 30 October. The Opted-out status is the regulation's shared-identifier case, because the landline matches both Rosa and her mother.

Her next steps come from the right-hand column: opt out the maiden-name profile by its URL (the second-identity problem in Census surname counts), ask Brand A which route covers her mother's report, and send any stale snippet to the outdated-content refresh. The deed stays on file.

What should you do if your information is still online?

Start from the thing you can see, not from the tool you heard about.

1. Is the live URL still up? If yes, you are not done at layer 1. Identify the publisher.
2. Is the publisher a people-search brand? Use that brand's official opt-out, and use DROP as well if you are an eligible California resident. Record the scope.
3. Is the publisher a first-party business you have an account with? Use that business's privacy channel. In California, that is a CCPA request, not DROP.
4. Is the publisher a government office, court, or licensing board? Use the record-holder route. Do not expect Google, DROP, or Spokeo to unfile it.
5. Is the publisher a newspaper, school, or other page Google treats as public-interest? You may get a monitor hit and no removal. Ask the publisher. Do not file the same Search request until the policy changes.
6. Is the live URL gone, but Search still shows it? Now use the outdated-content or Results-about-you path for that exact URL.
7. Did a listing return later? Compare URL, record ID, visible fields, and search path with the confirmation you saved. The reappearance guide is the worksheet. The cause is usually a new upstream row, a second identity cluster, a relative's report, a different search mode, a stale snippet, or an exemption, not necessarily the same listing being restored.

If you cannot name the layer, do not send more identity data. More data helps a match at layer 3 and can create a new file everywhere else.

Be wary of any opt-out form that asks for part of your Social Security number: in August 2026 the CalPrivacy Board ordered LocateSmarter LLC to pay $116,490, finding that it registered late and unlawfully required partial Social Security numbers before Californians could opt out.

Can a paid removal service delete everything?

No. The FTC says you can submit people-search opt-outs yourself for free or pay a service. Before paying, ask which sites it covers, whether it reports completed requests, and how often it checks for new listings. Payment does not give a service the power to erase an official public record.

Measure progress by the URLs and search paths you checked: which listings are gone, which snippets have refreshed, and which exceptions remain. The legal processing windows above are not measured completion times for a particular broker.

Remove your information from DeepSearch

Remove my info is layer 2 for DeepSearch. It has two separate free requests: a search-results removal, confirmed by a code sent to your email, that stops DeepSearch returning the matched record on the website, the apps and the API; and a takedown of one public page built around a phone number or a public figure.

Neither request delists a source we linked to, a Google snippet, or a court record. The page says the form cannot "delete a court, government, news, social-media, business-directory, data-broker, telecom, or other independent source record," and that search engines and archives may keep cached copies.

How to correct or remove information from DeepSearch covers mixed identities as well as takedowns, and where DeepSearch gets its data explains where results come from.

If we are treating a public record as if our removal form could unfile it, or treating a Search approval as if it deleted a broker row, that is a mistake in this model. The contact page is the right place to say so.

Frequently asked questions

Can you completely delete yourself from the internet?

No single request does it, and for most people part of it cannot be done. You can hide results in each search engine, opt out of each people-search product and, in California, use DROP for registered brokers. Public records and copies others already made usually remain.

How do you remove your personal information from the internet for free?

DROP is free by law, the FTC says you can opt out of people-search sites yourself for free, and you file Google's requests yourself. A paid service files the same requests for you and does not reach public records.

How do I remove my mobile number from all websites?

There is no all-websites request. Ask Google to remove results that show the number, opt out of each people-search brand that lists it, check its phone-search reports separately, and, in California, add the number to your DROP profile.