Where Does DeepSearch Get Its Data?

DeepSearch gets information from public webpages, profiles, records and news, plus licensed numbering and people-data services and public breach-notification indexes. The sources available depend on the lookup and product surface.

To understand a result, check both its source and what that source supports. A carrier label describes a number; a public profile describes an account; neither alone verifies the person behind it. The table below shows how to read those differences. Our privacy policy and terms set the binding rules for access, retention and use.

What data sources does DeepSearch use?

DeepSearch can use several source categories, depending on the lookup and product surface:

• public web pages
• public social media profiles
• public records and directories
• news and published articles
• licensed telecom carrier and numbering services that identify a number's carrier, line type, and assignment region
• public breach-notification indexes that name incidents associated with an email address
• licensed people-data and identity-resolution providers, on the account-based surfaces that offer them

None of these categories is secret. The FTC describes the whole people-search category the same way: such sites may compile government public records, collect public social media profiles and buy information from other data brokers. What a reader needs is to know which category a given claim came from, because the category sets how much weight the claim can carry.

Public-web claims should link to a page a reader can inspect. Licensed numbering metadata, people-data associations, and public breach-notification records should be labeled by source category or provider. Our MPP research documentation says licensed broker results need a DeepSearch account, "where results keep their provider attribution."

Paying for a dataset does not make its identity associations verified facts, and none of these categories provides private-account access or leaked credential contents. The guide to what each source category can and cannot establish takes them one at a time.

Read the source category

Access to information is not verification of a person

The available sources depend on the lookup and product surface.

Public sources

• Webpages, profiles, public records and news.

  Check the original page, its date and what it says.

• Public breach-notification indexes.

  An incident association, not access to leaked contents.

Licensed sources

• Carrier, line type and numbering metadata.

  Describes the number; does not verify its current user.

• People-data and identity-resolution providers.

  Keep provider attribution; an association is still a candidate.

Outside the boundary

Consumer service

• Private accounts and messages
• Passwords and leaked credentials
• Live location
• Private carrier subscriber records

Can DeepSearch access private accounts or messages?

The privacy policy sets the boundary for the consumer service: "We do not access private accounts, private messages, passwords, leaked credentials, live location, or private carrier subscriber records." Each exclusion has a reason and a cost.

No leaked credential contents. A public breach-notification index may tell us the name of an incident associated with an email address. We do not expose or search stolen passwords, hashes, private fields, or the contents of a breached record. The cost is that an email check can name an incident, but not say what it exposed about you.

No private accounts. We don't access private or follower-only accounts. If a profile is private, it stays private, and the terms forbid anyone from using DeepSearch to "discover or expose private accounts."

No call or message contents. DeepSearch does not provide private inboxes, direct messages, call audio, text-message contents, or call history. Carrier call records also have federal protection: under 18 U.S.C. 1039, obtaining them by fraud, or selling them without the customer's prior authorization, carries up to 10 years in prison.

No private carrier subscriber records. Licensed numbering data can identify a carrier, line type, and assignment region, and in limited cases it carries a caller label. It does not reveal communications or show the device's location, and a caller label is not a verified subscriber identity.

No live location. We can't tell you where someone is. A public post can show where someone was when it was published, and photo location estimates where an image was taken. Neither is access to a person's device.

How can you check the source of a result?

Every public-web fact in a profile should carry a link to the page it came from, because a claim you can't check is worth very little. If our summary says someone is a designer in Austin, you should be able to click through and see the page that says so, and decide for yourself whether that page is credible.

The links also make our mistakes visible. A sentence with no source behind it, or a source that doesn't say what the summary says, is something you can catch and report. The terms hold developers to the same rule: API customers may not "remove source attribution or safety notices." The guide to checking a result against its sources breaks the check into four questions: retrieval, attribution, interpretation and freshness.

Example: reading the sources in a phone and email lookup

Illustrative example, not a real search result. You are about to buy a used camera from a marketplace seller who signs messages "Robin Vale" and gave you the email robin.vale@example.com and the number (202) 555-0147. You run an email search and a phone search before paying. A result might contain these fields.

A good summary of that result says the handle and email connect the marketplace profile and the forum post, and that no source in this search ties the phone number to the name. The breach entry says nothing about whether the seller is honest.

What DeepSearch won't add, however the question is phrased: the seller's live location, the contents of the breached record or any password, messages or call history for the number, anything behind a private account, or a verdict on the seller's character.

Does DeepSearch generate information with AI?

There's an AI layer that reads what was found and writes it up, and answers follow-up questions. The privacy policy lists what it may do: interpret a prompt, generate search variants, rank possible matches, extract facts, summarize sources, translate text, or draft an answer. It is not a source of facts in its own right.

That means it should say "no source in this search ties this person to that address" rather than guessing, and "possible match" rather than asserting an identity the evidence doesn't support. AI summaries can contain errors even when their wording sounds confident.

So the policies treat its output as a draft. The privacy policy says AI output "can be inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, or attributed to the wrong person," and the terms tell users not to represent it as verified by DeepSearch.

Can sources about different people be mixed up?

A result can be wrong because it combines records about different people who share a name. When checking candidates, apply these rules:

• names alone never establish a match
• a single signal is a hypothesis, not a conclusion
• corroboration across independent sources is what raises confidence
• results are ranked with a confidence score, so you choose the right person rather than being handed one

The consequence is that a result can show two candidates where you hoped for one. That's the intended trade. A confident wrong profile about a real human being is a worse outcome than an incomplete one. The longer note explains why a shared name is never treated as proof.

What can DeepSearch results be used for?

Some of this is law and some is our own line. Both are in our terms.

Not for FCRA-covered decisions. We are not a consumer reporting agency. Results must not be used to decide employment, credit, housing, insurance, or tenancy. Those decisions require a screening provider operating under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which allows a report only for the permissible purposes in 15 U.S.C. 1681b.

Under the FTC's guidance for employers, an employer needs the applicant's written permission and, before any adverse action, must give them a copy of the report and a summary of their rights.

We provide none of that, which is exactly why we say don't use us for it. The terms add that obtaining a person's consent "does not convert DeepSearch into a compliant screening product." The longer note covers what separates a people-search result from a consumer report.

Not for stalking or harassment. Aggregating public information to monitor, locate, or pressure someone who doesn't want contact is the harm this category is criticised for, and the criticism is fair. The information being public doesn't make the aggregation harmless.

Not for doxxing. Publishing someone's home address or workplace to expose them is not research.

Not for face identification or tracking. A reverse-image search looks for the same or a similar image on public pages, which is different from identifying a face. The terms forbid building "unlawful surveillance, facial-recognition, biometric-identification, or tracking systems" with DeepSearch.

How the rules are enforced. The terms make the user responsible for the purpose of a search. They let us require "email confirmation, reauthentication, payment verification, or other proportionate checks," and let us restrict or end access when we reasonably believe there is misuse.

Does DeepSearch store your searches and reports?

A search is also a record about you, the person searching. The privacy policy treats searches, prompts, filters, candidate choices, reports opened and chat threads as usage data DeepSearch may collect.

The shared cache means a report built for one customer can be shown to another who later looks up the same subject. Deleting your account does not remove cached reports about other people. The person a report is about can suppress it, as the next section describes.

On selling data, the policy separates two things. We don't sell the payment credentials, private account content or Data Cleanup profile you give us for money. We do run a paid service whose core function is to "find, organize, and provide access to public and licensed information about search subjects," and some state laws may count that paid access as a sale.

How do you remove your information from DeepSearch?

If you appear in DeepSearch results, you can remove yourself for free and without an account on Remove my info. Give your name and an email address you can open, and enter the code we send. We then withhold every identifier on the provider record that address matches, so the removal keeps working when the provider refreshes its data.

The same page takes down our public phone-number and public-figure pages. A phone number or direct page link is normally suppressed as soon as the form succeeds. A name alone is reviewed by hand, because a name-wide block could remove a different person's page; we aim to finish that review within 30 days.

To correct a result instead, email the page URL, the field, why it is wrong, and a reliable public source. We will not ask you to prove that every true public fact should remain accessible.

Appeals go by email with the subject "Removal appeal", and an urgent safety risk goes to support with "Urgent safety" and the exact URL. That channel is not an emergency service: if someone is in immediate danger, contact local emergency services.

Our removal covers our output. It cannot delete a court, government, news or data-broker record, or a search engine's cached copy. The guide to which correction or removal route fits the problem sorts the cases, and the four-layers note explains what each removal route can and cannot reach.

Where can you check DeepSearch's data policies?

Each commitment above is written in a public policy with its own "Last updated" date, so you can check us against the current text.

If one of those pages changes, this post should change with it. If you find a result that crosses one of these lines, or find us falling short of any of it, keep the result URL and the source and tell us. The contact page reaches us.