Search your own name with your city. The results usually include several people-search sites listing your age, home address, past addresses, phone numbers, relatives, and sometimes an income or home-value estimate. Anyone can see the preview; anyone with a few dollars can buy the full report. You never gave any of these sites permission, so where did it come from?
The supply chain
Public records are the backbone: voter rolls, property deeds, court filings, licenses. On top of that sit commercial sources, including warranty cards, loyalty programs, magazine subscriptions, and data sold between companies. Aggregators buy and merge these feeds, then hundreds of people-search storefronts resell the merged profile. That structure explains the two facts that matter for removal: deleting yourself from one site does nothing about the others, and removed data returns when the next feed refresh arrives.
Why it matters more than spam calls
The casual harm is robocalls and junk mail. The serious harms are targeted: scammers building convincing stories from your relatives and addresses (the "grandparent scam" runs on exactly this data), stalkers and harassers finding home addresses, and identity thieves using leaked details to pass verification checks. The FTC logged over a million identity theft reports in 2024, and older adults lost the most money.
Cutting the chain
Every legitimate broker offers an opt-out, because laws like California's CCPA force them to. Doing it yourself is free and we publish step-by-step guides for every site we cover. The honest catch is volume and persistence: 70+ sites, each with its own process, re-checked every few months forever. That persistence is the actual product when you pay a removal service - so whichever one you choose, make sure it shows you receipts.