Your personal information is everywhere — and most of it got there without your permission. Home address, phone numbers, email addresses, family members, income estimates, and more are being collected, packaged, and sold by hundreds of companies you've never heard of.
This guide covers the most important steps you can take in 2025 to protect your personal information online, from removing your data from broker sites to locking down your accounts and securing your photos.
The scale of the problem: There are over 4,000 data brokers operating in the US. The average American's profile exists on at least 200 of them. Most people have no idea their data is there.
Step 1: Remove Your Data from Data Broker Sites
Data brokers are companies like Spokeo, WhitePages, BeenVerified, Intelius, and hundreds of others that collect and sell your personal information. Anyone can pay a few dollars to search for your name and find your address, phone number, and more.
What's actually on these sites
A typical data broker profile includes:
- Full legal name and all known aliases
- Current and past home addresses (going back years)
- Phone numbers (including unlisted numbers)
- Email addresses
- Family member names and relationships
- Age and date of birth
- Employment history and income estimates
- Property records and estimated home values
- Voter registration data in some states
How to opt out
Every major data broker is required by law (in many states) to honor opt-out requests. The process typically involves:
- Search for your name on the broker's site
- Find your profile
- Click "Remove" or "Opt Out"
- Complete a verification step (email confirmation, CAPTCHA, etc.)
- Wait 24–72 hours for removal
Manually opting out of all data brokers takes 100+ hours. Services like STRIPIT automate this process for you, covering 500+ brokers continuously — because your data gets re-listed regularly.
Step 2: Lock Down Your Google Presence
Google indexes and displays personal information from data broker sites and other public sources. Searching your name on Google is the first thing a potential employer, date, or bad actor will do.
Request removal of results from Google
Google has a Results About You tool that lets you request removal of search results showing your personal information like home address, phone number, or email. Use it.
Set up Google Alerts
Go to alerts.google.com and create alerts for your full name (in quotes), your phone number, and your home address. You'll be notified any time new content appears about you.
Step 3: Audit Your Social Media Privacy Settings
Social media profiles are one of the biggest sources of data for brokers, employers, and bad actors. Every platform allows you to control who sees your content — and most people have never changed the defaults.
Go to Settings → Privacy. Lock down past posts, disable friend list visibility, and remove yourself from search engine results.
Switch to a private account in Settings → Privacy. Remove location data from existing posts and disable exact location in Stories.
Control who can see your connections, hide your activity status, and limit profile visibility in Settings → Visibility.
X (Twitter)
Consider making your account protected (private). At minimum, remove your phone number and disable location data on tweets.
What to audit in your existing content
Before locking down settings, review what you've already posted:
- Photos showing your home exterior or neighborhood
- Posts mentioning your employer, salary, or career frustrations
- Check-ins that reveal your daily routines
- Controversial opinions that could be taken out of context
- Photos of your ID, passport, or personal documents
STRIPIT's Social Media Monitor automatically scans your public posts using AI to flag content that could pose professional or reputational risks — so you can review and take action before it becomes a problem.
Step 4: Secure Your Accounts with Strong Passwords
Data breaches expose billions of credentials every year. If you're reusing passwords across sites (and most people are), a breach at one service puts every other account at risk.
Use a password manager
Password managers like 1Password, Bitwarden (free and open source), or Dashlane generate and store unique, complex passwords for every site. You only need to remember one master password.
Enable two-factor authentication (2FA)
Add a second layer of security to every account that offers it. Use an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy) rather than SMS when possible — SIM swapping attacks can intercept text message codes.
Priority accounts to secure with 2FA:
- Email (this is the key to everything else)
- Financial accounts and banking
- Social media accounts
- Cloud storage (iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox)
- Any account with your payment information
Step 5: Protect Your Photos Online
Your photos can appear across the web in ways you'd never expect — scraping by news sites, AI training datasets, stock photo aggregators, and more. Reverse image search technology makes it easy to find every place your face appears online.
What you can do
- Regularly run reverse image searches using Google Images or TinEye
- Add watermarks to professional photos you share online
- Be selective about what photos you post publicly
- Disable facial recognition tagging on Facebook
- Request removal from any site displaying your photos without permission
STRIPIT's Image Detection feature automatically scans the web for your photos and shows you every place they appear online — along with confidence scores and removal request tools.
Step 6: Be Careful What You Share Going Forward
Prevention is always easier than cleanup. A few habits that make a big difference:
Email hygiene
- Use a unique email alias for newsletters, sign-ups, and online purchases. Services like Apple Hide My Email or SimpleLogin can help.
- Never use your primary email for public forum registrations, comment sections, or services you're trying out
Phone number protection
- Consider getting a Google Voice number for public-facing registrations
- Opt out of sharing with third parties whenever a company asks
- Register your number on the National Do Not Call Registry
Be skeptical of free services
If a product is free, you are often the product. Apps that request access to your contacts, location, photos, or microphone may be using that data in ways you'd prefer they didn't. Check app permissions regularly in your phone settings and revoke what you don't need.
Step 7: Monitor Your Credit
Identity theft is one of the most serious consequences of data exposure. Monitoring your credit helps you catch fraudulent accounts early.
- Check your free credit reports at AnnualCreditReport.com (all three bureaus, free weekly through 2026)
- Place a free security freeze at all three credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) — this is the most effective protection against new account fraud
- Sign up for credit monitoring through your bank or a dedicated service
Take the First Step Today
STRIPIT automates the hardest parts of protecting your privacy — ongoing data broker removal, photo detection, and social media monitoring. Start with a free 7-day trial.
Start Free Trial →Summary: Your Privacy Action Plan
Protecting yourself online doesn't have to be overwhelming. Start with the highest-impact actions:
- Opt out of data brokers — or use a service like STRIPIT to do it for you
- Request Google removals of search results showing your personal info
- Audit and lock your social media privacy settings
- Use a password manager and enable 2FA on all important accounts
- Monitor your credit and place a freeze if you're not actively applying for credit
- Be more careful going forward about what you share, where, and with whom
Privacy is not something you achieve once and forget — it's an ongoing practice. But with the right tools and habits, you can dramatically reduce your exposure and take back control of your digital identity.