How do you get your personal information off the internet?

Most of what appears when someone searches your name comes from data brokers, companies that aggregate public records, purchase histories, and online activity into profiles they sell. Each maintains its own opt-out process, and there are hundreds of them, though a few dozen account for most of the visible exposure. The opt-outs work, and they are individually straightforward and collectively tedious, requiring name searches, verification steps, and re-checking every several months since profiles frequently reappear. Paid removal services automate this for a subscription and are a reasonable purchase for anyone who values the time more than the fee.

State law gives you real leverage in a growing number of places. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and others have comprehensive privacy laws granting rights to access, delete, and opt out of the sale of your personal information, enforceable against companies meeting the coverage thresholds. California additionally created a mechanism intended to let residents request deletion across registered data brokers through a single process. Citing the relevant statute in a deletion request tends to produce faster compliance than a generic one.

Beyond brokers, address the sources. Google offers a results-removal request for pages containing personal contact information and government identifiers, which removes them from search even when the underlying page persists. Old accounts on services you no longer use should be deleted rather than abandoned, since they are breach exposure and profile material. Tighten privacy settings on social platforms and remove your birthdate, phone number, and address from public profiles. Two realistic expectations: information in genuine public records such as property ownership and court filings generally cannot be removed, and this is maintenance rather than a project, since new data flows in continuously and quarterly re-checks are the price of keeping the profile down.