Guides

How to Remove Your Home Address From the Internet (2026 Guide)

2026-06-07 · byscento Privacy Team

Type your name into Google and you'll often find your home address sitting on a people-search site, one click away from a map and a street-view photo of your front door. You never posted it, but it's there - pulled from public records and resold by data brokers. The good news: most of it can be removed. The catch: it tends to come back, so removal is a process, not a one-time fix.

Why your address is exposed

Two pipelines put your address online:

• Public records - property deeds, voter registration, court filings, and business licenses are public by law. Brokers scrape and aggregate them into searchable profiles.
• Data brokers and people-search sites - companies like Spokeo, Whitepages, and dozens more package those records (plus commercial data) into profiles anyone can look up, often for free.

Because brokers buy and resell from each other, the same address spreads across many sites. That's why removing it from one doesn't remove it from all.

Opt out of people-search sites

This is where most exposed addresses live, so start here. Almost every people-search site has an opt-out or "suppression" process, usually buried in the footer:

1. Search the site for your profile and copy the profile URL.
2. Find the site's opt-out page and submit the URL (some require email confirmation).
3. Save the confirmation. Removals can take a few days to a few weeks.

Start with the highest-traffic sites, since those are the ones people actually find. We publish step-by-step removal guides, including Spokeo and Whitepages, plus opt-out instructions for 600+ brokers in our removal directory.

If you live in California, you have extra leverage: under the CCPA and its amendment, the CPRA, you can demand that a business delete your personal information and stop selling it, and you can use an authorized agent to file those requests on your behalf. Several other states have passed comparable consumer-privacy laws. These rights make a deletion request harder for a broker to ignore.

Remove it from Google search results

Even after a broker hides your profile, the old page can linger in Google's index for a while. Google offers a "Results about you" tool that lets you request removal of search results that expose personal contact information, including your home address and phone number.

1. Open Google's "Results about you" tool (in your Google Account or the Google app).
2. Submit the URLs that show your address.
3. Track each request; Google reviews them and removes qualifying results.

This hides the result in Google, but it does not delete the underlying page. You still need to opt out at the source so the data is actually gone, not just harder to search.

Blur your home on map services

Street-level imagery can show your house, car, and surroundings. You can request blurring:

• Google Maps / Street View - open Street View at your address, click "Report a problem," and request that your home be blurred. This is permanent once applied, so be sure before you submit.
• Apple Maps - submit a blurring request through Apple's Maps image-collection privacy form.
• Other map providers - most major mapping services offer a similar imagery-takedown request.

Brokers re-list, so monitoring matters

Here's the part people miss. Opting out is not permanent. Brokers refresh their databases from new public records, and your profile can reappear weeks or months later, sometimes on a site you already cleared. A single removal pass gives you a clean result today and a dirty one by next quarter.

That's why the real work is ongoing: re-scan the major brokers regularly, re-submit opt-outs when your data returns, and keep an eye on new sites that spring up. Doing this by hand across hundreds of brokers is tedious, which is exactly why most people stop after a few sites.

Get it done and keep it done

You can do every step above yourself, and our removal guides walk you through each one. If you'd rather not manage hundreds of opt-outs and the constant re-listing, that's what byscento is for: we find where your address is exposed, remove it, and keep monitoring so it stays gone. Start with a free scan to see which sites are listing your home address right now.