To opt out of data brokers, you submit a deletion or opt-out request to each company holding your information, verify the request through the confirmation email they send, and repeat the process every few months because brokers rebuild profiles from fresh public records. There are hundreds of these companies, roughly 20 states now give you a legal right to demand removal, and the work is mechanically simple but repetitive. You can do it yourself for free, pay a service to do it for you, or, if you live in California, use a single state-run portal that hits every registered broker at once.
Gather Your Information Before You Submit Anything
Spend about 20 minutes assembling the identifiers brokers use to match records to you. You need every version of your name that might appear in a database: maiden name, married name, middle-name variations, and nicknames you’ve used on official documents. Add every residential address from the last decade, every email address, and every phone number you’ve used. Brokers cross-reference these to link records, and an incomplete request can leave your profile up under a variation you forgot.
Keep everything in one spreadsheet so you can copy and paste across dozens of forms. You will use the same spreadsheet later to track submissions.
Some brokers require a government-issued ID before they will process a request. If you hit that requirement, redact everything except your name and photo before uploading. Black out your date of birth, ID number, and any other sensitive field using photo editing software or a PDF annotation tool. The broker only needs to confirm you are who you claim to be; a full unredacted ID hands them more data than they already have.
Which Brokers to Target First
People-search sites should be your first priority. Companies like Spokeo, Whitepages, and Intelius let anyone search your name and pull up addresses, phone numbers, relatives, and sometimes criminal records. The information is freely searchable, so the privacy payoff from removal is immediate and visible.
The second category is large marketing and analytics firms like LexisNexis and Epsilon that aggregate consumer profiles and sell them to advertisers, insurers, and other businesses. Your data on these platforms is less visible to the public but more commercially valuable, and the opt-out processes tend to be more bureaucratic. Handle these after the people-search sites.
Realistically, knocking out 10 to 15 of the most prominent brokers covers the majority of your exposure.
How to Submit a Removal Request
Most brokers use an online form. You enter your identifying information, select the type of request (deletion, opt-out of sale, or both), and submit. Opt-out pages are usually buried at the bottom of the homepage under labels like “Privacy Policy,” “Do Not Sell My Info,” or “Data Subject Request.” Some brokers make you search for your own profile on their site and claim it before you can request removal.
Nearly every broker sends a verification email with a confirmation link after you submit. If you don’t click that link, usually within a day or two, the request dies and you start over. Check your spam folder, because these messages frequently land there.
A smaller number of brokers still accept requests only by postal mail or fax. Send a written request with your identifying details, state explicitly that you are requesting deletion and opting out of any future sale of your data, and keep a copy. Certified mail with a return receipt gives you proof of delivery if you ever need to escalate.
Track every submission in your spreadsheet: broker name, date submitted, confirmation number if provided, and the statutory deadline for the company to respond. Expect several hours over a weekend to work through the major brokers.
Deletion Versus Suppression, and What Deadlines Apply
Deletion and suppression are not the same thing. When a broker deletes your data, they remove your profile from their active database. When they suppress it, they keep a record of your identity specifically so they can prevent your profile from being recreated from future data purchases. Suppression is actually more useful in practice because it blocks re-listing, but some brokers only suppress on request. Confirm with each broker what their default process involves.
Deadlines depend on where you live. California gives businesses 45 calendar days to respond, extendable to 90 days total with notice. Colorado requires opt-out requests within 15 days. Most other state privacy laws fall in the 30-to-45-day range. Roughly 20 states have comprehensive consumer privacy laws that back these requests. If you live outside those states, most large brokers still process opt-outs uniformly because maintaining separate workflows costs more than just honoring every request, but the legal teeth are weaker if a company decides to ignore you.
Deletion is not absolute. Businesses are not required to delete data they need to complete a transaction you initiated, comply with a legal obligation, detect security incidents, or exercise free speech. In practice these exceptions rarely apply to people-search sites, which have no direct relationship with you and no independent legal need to keep your data.
What to Do When a Broker Ignores You
If a broker blows past the deadline, resubmit the request with a note referencing the original submission date and any tracking number. A small percentage of requests genuinely get lost. Give the resubmission another full deadline cycle before escalating.
If the second attempt goes nowhere, file a formal complaint with your state attorney general or, if your state has one, its dedicated privacy enforcement agency. California’s Privacy Protection Agency enforces the state’s consumer privacy law and uses complaints to monitor compliance and inform enforcement actions. Other states route complaints through the attorney general’s consumer protection division.
Document everything before filing. Your spreadsheet log, confirmation emails, and screenshots of the broker’s search results showing your profile still visible create the paper trail agencies need. Without documentation, your complaint is just an assertion. With it, you’re contributing to a pattern regulators can act on.
The California Shortcut: DROP
If you live in California, one request can reach every registered broker in the state. The Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform, called DROP, was created by California’s Delete Act. You verify California residency through the state’s identity gateway, provide basic information like your name, date of birth, and email address, and the system routes your request to all data brokers registered with the state.
Starting August 1, 2026, every registered data broker must check DROP at least once every 45 days and process all verified deletion requests within that same 45-day window. Brokers that fail face penalties of $200 per unprocessed request per day. The system also requires brokers to keep deleting any newly collected data about you on the same 45-day cycle, which addresses the re-scraping problem that plagues one-time manual requests.
DROP only works for California residents. Everyone else still goes broker by broker.
Global Privacy Control for Ongoing Coverage
Global Privacy Control is a browser-level signal that automatically tells every website you visit not to sell or share your personal data. It runs in the background. Brave has it on by default, Firefox includes it in privacy settings, and the DuckDuckGo browser and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger extension also support it.
California requires businesses to treat the GPC signal as a valid opt-out. Colorado recognizes it as an approved universal opt-out mechanism. At least 10 other states, including Connecticut, Montana, Texas, Oregon, Delaware, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Maryland, have laws that require or will soon require businesses to honor opt-out preference signals.
GPC has a real limit: it communicates only an opt-out from data sale and sharing. It does not submit a deletion request. Existing records stay in the broker’s database; the broker is simply supposed to stop selling them going forward. Enable it in your browser, then still go through the manual process for brokers that already have your data.
Paid Removal Services
If submitting dozens of individual requests sounds like more than you want to handle, paid services will do it for you. Individual subscriptions run roughly $100 to $180 per year. These services combine automated software for standardized opt-out forms with human staff for brokers that have unusual or complex removal processes. No single approach catches everything, which is why the hybrid model exists.
The important thing to understand is that these are subscriptions, not one-time fixes. Data brokers constantly re-scrape public records and rebuild profiles. A profile you deleted in January can reappear by June. The service earns its fee by continuously monitoring and resubmitting removal requests as your data resurfaces. Cancel the subscription and the removals stop; profiles gradually come back. For people who value their time more than $100 to $180 a year, the trade is reasonable. For everyone else, manual requests get to the same place with more effort.
Keeping Profiles From Coming Back
The hardest part of opting out is not the first round of requests. It’s the maintenance. Brokers constantly replenish their databases from public records, marketing databases, social media scraping, and purchases from other aggregators. A profile you successfully removed often reappears within a few months as the broker ingests a fresh batch of data that includes your information.
Set a calendar reminder to check the major people-search sites every six months. Search your name, former names, and known addresses on each broker’s public lookup tool. If your profile has reappeared, submit a new removal request. Six months is the minimum frequency that keeps your exposure manageable if you’re doing it manually.
Beyond opt-outs, reduce the raw material feeding these databases. Limit what you share on social media, use a P.O. box or mail-forwarding service instead of your home address where possible, and opt out of marketing lists through the Direct Marketing Association. Voter registration records, property tax filings, and court documents are public records that brokers harvest, and you generally cannot prevent those from being created. Shrinking your voluntary data footprint shrinks the profile a broker can build. The goal isn’t perfect invisibility. It’s making your information sparse enough that the broker’s profile becomes commercially useless.