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How To Remove Your Personal Information From Background Check Websites
After our social media background check, are you afraid of what a future employer may find out about you? Rest easy as we have some tips to help you remove your personal information from more than a dozen online background check websites.

How Do These Sites Get My Information?
There are hundreds of online background check websites that gather information on people. In the US, these online databases are populated with information from public records like real estate transactions, arrest records, court cases, marriages, divorces, etc.

Before the Internet, investigators would have to go to the local town hall or the state records office and request this public information in person. Now with databases a dime a dozen, most of this information is readily accessible if you know where to look.

A background check website will both mine these public databases and obtain demographic information from marketing companies. If you're young, you're paper trail is likely small, but if you're older, the amount of publicly available information can be staggering.

What They Know About You
Most of this information is not as salacious as those party pics from the Bahamas, but you may not want your future boss finding out you recently went through a messy divorce. Before you start the removal process, you'll need to find out what information these companies have, if any. We used Social Intelligence for our background check, but there's a dozen or more big players that focus primarily on public information and not your social networks. It's these public databases that we'll look at here.

You'll need to go to the following sites and search for your name, address, and age.

Intelius.com
Acxiom.com
MyLife.com
ZabaSearch.com
Spoke.com
BeenVerified.com
PeekYou.com
USSearch.com
PeopleFinders.com
PeopleLookup.com
PeopleSmart.com
PrivateEye.com
WhitePages.com
USA-People-Search.com
Spokeo.com
PublicRecordsNow.com
DOBSearch.com
Radaris.com

What Kind of Personal Information Are in People Search and Public Data Sources?

Internet is such a great resource to look for information, you can easily search and find information from search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com, Ask.com, or at specialized people search databases and social networks.

It is quite easy to search private information on Internet on almost everyone. As you will see next, there are hundreds online people search or background check websites on the Internet. You can make a background check on a lost friend, a missing relative, a potential date, a new neighbor, a prank caller, a ruthless car driver, an unknown mobile number, an unlisted phone number, your boss, your coworker, or strangers you never meet.

On the flip side, not only you can find anything about others, people can also find anything about you - which includes your personal records, private photos or videos, negative comments, and bad publicity.

Creditors, banks, political parties use your personal data for legitimate purpose. However, unscrupulous individuals and criminals can use the same information to harm you and your family. With the full availability of your personal information, your identity can be stolen or exploited in illegal activities such as identity theft, predatory marketing, credit fraud, Internet stalking, and etc.

With the cost of several dollar or even free, they can also obtain your information legally from online background check sites. The personal information available at these sites are not basic information about your name, address, or phone numbers, the information obtained at these sites are serious Personal and Private Information. To many people, the availability of these information on Internet invades their privacy and could potentially put their family and children on the risk.

At most background check and people search sites, a comprehensive background search on a person may include:

* Up-to-date contact information includes address history, phone numbers, cell phone numbers , email addresses, and P.O. box;
* Names and alias used, household income, companies worked;
* Relatives, household members, neighbors, and associates;
* Marital, family status, marriage history, marriage / divorce records;
* Nationwide criminal record check, sex offender check;
* Bankruptcies, liens, judgments, court records: dates, parties, lawyer names for both parties, verdicts;
* Criminal & background records. police files, arrest records jail records, inmate records;
* Age and DOB - birth records and hospital records;
* Property and real estate records;
* Business ownership and professional listings; etc etc


Most visitors came to this site had already learned that their personal information were exposed on the Internet, they are looking for fast ways to remove and hide their information from public search before getting hurt by strangers or stalkers. If you are not sure what types of personal information about you are available from people search sites, you can make a quick background check on yourself through Intelius:

It is true that there are hundreds online people search websites, and even Internet search engines lead you to background check sites. However, most these people search sites are associated with several powerful people databases behind the scene. Do you need to visit them all these websites to remove your information? The answer is no, it is time consuming and almost impossible to go through every search website.

As a matter of fact, the basic people search data feed at Google, Yahoo, Lycos, Whowhere etc is provided by one company - a little surprised?

Clearly, the best way to keep personal information off the internet is find the data sources which are providing personal information to people search sites - find effective ways to stop them from feeding your personal information to the public continuously.

At most Internet search engines and people search websites, you can make a request to remove out your personal information through an opt-out process under its privacy policy. However, with so many people search websites, search engines, and social network websites, the opt-out process is quite complicated and lengthy. The privacy policy disclaimers are vague and interpreted differently by each website. If you want to remove negative information such as bad reviews and comments about yourself or your company from some Internet forums and rating websites, it is almost impossible without professional help.

Most Internet people search websites are data terminals and cannot remove your information directly from their websites, as a matter of fact, they have to forward your request to their up-stream data providers, this is a lengthy process. No website would tell you where their data feed comes from too - that's their business secrets.

Even if you have found the data source providers, it's not easy to opt-out your information. Keeping and selling your personal information is their main business. It costs money and efforts to attain, maintain, and update millions of personal records.

Removing your personal information from these powerful online databases by yourself will take time. Another reason why it takes so long is because some search sites require you to send a formal removal request through a regular U.S. mail. Of course, it can take weeks to get an answer or no answers at all. It makes us wonder why would they want to take this traditional mailing approach in the days of Internet and electronic age. Of course, the laws have not changed much to take into consideration of digital Internet information age. To get immediate results, you may consider to use professional companies to help you as will be discussed later.

After my extensive research, the following are some major players in people search on the Internet (not inclusive):

(1) Intelius.com
(2) Acxiom.com
(3) USsearch.com
(4) Yahoo.com's People Search
(5) Google.com
(6) ZabaSearch.com
(7) PeopleFinder.com
(8) Spokeo.com
(9) Alliance Data and EXelate

There are several other popular people search sites don't allow to list their names here.

To stop people from getting your personal information, we will discuss people search sites and data sources such as 411.com, Intelius, Acxiom, US Search, Peoplefinder, Yahoo.com, Whitepages.com, whowhere.com, zabasearch.com, privateeyes.com, infospace.com and many others in the next section. How to contact data mining companies, how to get professional help. One section is dedicated to deleting your information from Google search results.

Procedures to Remove Your Name & Personal Information from Internet
Remove Negative Search Results and Unwanted Information
With hundreds of people search databases and sites contain your personal information, removing your name and personal data from the Internet is a tedious task. As we mentioned above, you don't need to go through all these sites to remove your information from the Internet. You need to go to the data sources to stop personal information from being searched by others. This is what this article is trying to accomplish - help you get your unwanted information off the Internet.

(1) Intelius is a most well-known people search engine on Internet, its targets every Internet visitor. Many background search websites are affiliated with Intelius. Many popular people search websites are associated with Intelius. Intelius sells background information to anybody on anyone regardless who you are (unless you take an action to block it). The famous DateCheck site is also hosted by Intelius. Their reports include your name, address, date of birth, court records, unlisted or mobile number, and other personal info as described in the last section. You can search personal records by name, SSN, or by phone number, etc through Intelius.

As a courtesy, Intelius can 'opt out' your specific information from the Intelius's Search service. Your name as it appears in a particular record and the associated identifying information such as your address and phone number will be suppressed.

To remove your personal information from Intelius, they need some documents from you to confirm your identity. There are two ways to show your identity: (1) You would need to fax a copy of your driver license, you can cross-out your photo and license number, they only require your name, address and DOB; (2) Send them a notarized form confirms your identity.

At Intelius , under their Privacy section, there are instructions on how to remove your personal information from Intelius.

(2) Acxiom.com is probable the biggest personal information data provider behind the scene. It has been described as "one of the biggest companies you've never heard of." I used to trade its stock - ACXM. From reading their 10Q and 10K annual reports, I learned all big search engines such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, Lycos.com, WhoWhere.com etc are powered by Acxiom. Last year, Acxiom generated over $1.2 billion revenue from selling personal information. If you want to remove your private information from major search engines like Google or Yahoo, this is the first step you should take - have Acxiom remove your personal information from its data source either through your own effort or through other online personal information removal websites.

Acxiom has two databases. One database provide background check for businesses and law enforcements, and another database is provided for general public which powers the search engines. The data for businesses and law enforcements includes very sensitive financial information and social security numbers, your personal information cannot be removed from this database, but you can select to remove your personal information from the general public database. You can make such a request through email or phone call. Visit Acxiom website for details on how to remove your data from Acxiom or email privacy@acxiom.com, check their Privacy Statement. Be warned, it won't be easy to get it done without giving them more personal information first.

(3) US Search : You might have heard or seen US Search from TV or radio advertisements. Many websites are associated with USsearch. Like