Claude: Removing Your Digital Identity 📚

You never posted your home address online. So why does typing your name into Google pull up your address, your age, your relatives, and a phone number you have had for years?

Data brokers. Their entire business is buying, scraping, and reselling personal information. They pull from public records, old accounts, store loyalty cards, and other data they buy, then package it into a profile and put it on a people-search site like Spokeo or Whitepages. Anyone can look you up for a few dollars. You never agreed to it, and most people have no idea it is even happening.

Set your expectations honestly. You cannot erase yourself from the internet completely, and anyone promising that is selling something. What you CAN do is remove the large majority of your exposed personal info and make yourself much harder to find. That is the real win, and it is what this guide gets you.

By the numbers: hundreds of sites may list you, $0 to remove yourself, one afternoon to clean up. Almost all of it can be removed for free. It takes patience, which is exactly where Claude comes in. It cannot log into these sites for you, but it can write every removal request, deletion demand, and takedown notice so you are not staring at a blank page. You paste, you send, you move on.

You cannot clean up what you cannot see. Fifteen minutes here tells you exactly what to target.

1. Search yourself like a stranger would. Open a private browser window so your own history does not skew results. Search your name in quotes, then try it with your city, your old employer, and your phone number. Note every people-search site that shows up. Those are your hit list.
2. Check where your photos have been reposted. Use a reverse image search on the exact image you care about. Google Lens (images.google.com, click the camera) and TinEye (tineye.com) both do this well. Upload the one photo you want to track and they show you every other place it appears.
3. Set up alerts so you catch new stuff. Go to google.com/alerts and create alerts for your name and your phone number. Google will email you when new results appear. Cheapest early-warning system there is.

Prompt: map the search

I want to see what personal information about me is publicly searchable. Give me a checklist of the exact searches to run on myself (name variations, name plus city, phone, email) and the most common people-search sites I should look for in the results.

Tip: Keep a simple running list as you go: site name, what it exposed, and the link. You will hand pieces of this to Claude in the next steps, and it keeps you from doing the same site twice.

Google built a tool specifically for this, and most people do not know it exists. It finds search results that contain your personal contact info and lets you request removal in a few taps.

1. Open Results about you. In the Google app or at myactivity.google.com, find the tool called "Results about you." Enter your name, address, and phone. Google then scans its results and shows you which ones expose your contact details.
2. Request removal on what it finds. For each result that shows your personal info, request removal right from the tool. Google reviews it and, when it qualifies under their personal information removal policy, takes it out of search. The page still exists on the original site, but it stops showing up when someone searches you, which is most of the battle.
3. Have Claude write anything that needs a manual request. Some removals need a written request to Google or to the site.

What qualifies: Google will remove results that expose things like your home address, phone number, email, or other contact and identifying info that could be used to reach or identify you. It is aimed at your personal contact details, not general mentions of your name.

Prompt: Google removal request

Write a clear, polite request to Google to remove a search result that exposes my personal contact information under their personal information removal policy. Leave blanks for the URL, the specific info exposed, and my contact details. Keep it concise and factual.

Heads up: Getting something out of Google search does not delete it from the website hosting it. That is why the next step, going after the source sites directly, matters. Do both.

This is the heart of the cleanup. These people-search sites are where your address and phone actually live. Each one has a free opt-out. It is repetitive, so this is where Claude earns its keep.

Start with the largest, since their data feeds a lot of the smaller sites:

• Spokeo: find your listing, then submit it on their opt-out page with your email.
• Whitepages: use their suppression request form to remove your listing.
• BeenVerified: search your name, then use their opt-out page to claim and remove it.
• Radaris: claim your profile, then use their privacy / control page to remove it.
• Intelius / PeopleConnect: one opt-out covers Intelius, TruthFinder, and Instant Checkmate.
• MyLife: request removal via their opt-out contact.
• PeopleFinders: search your record and submit it on their opt-out page.
• Acxiom: a major data supplier; use their opt-out to cut off the source.

Prompt: build my opt-out plan

I want to remove my personal information from data broker and people-search sites. Give me a prioritized list of the biggest ones, and for each, tell me exactly how to opt out (the page to use or whether it needs an email). Put it in a checklist I can work through one by one.

Prompt: draft a deletion request

Write a firm but polite data deletion request I can email to a people-search site. Cite my right to have my personal information removed. Leave blanks for the site name, my name, and the exact info I want deleted. Keep it short enough that a support team will actually act on it.

If you are in California or Europe, say so. Strong privacy laws give you extra leverage. California residents can cite the CCPA right to deletion; people in the EU or UK can cite the GDPR right to erasure. Tell Claude your location and it will reference the right law, which gets requests taken more seriously.

Tip: Doing this by hand is free but tedious, and brokers re-list you over time. If your time is worth more than the hassle, paid services (the DeleteMe / Optery type) automate the opt-outs and keep re-checking. Totally optional, but worth knowing it exists.

Photos are their own thing. Getting one removed depends on who owns it and where it is posted, so match the method to the situation.

If you took the photo, you hold the copyright. A selfie or a picture you shot is yours. If someone reposted it without permission, you can send a DMCA takedown notice to the website or its hosting provider, and they are legally expected to act on it. This is the strongest tool you have for your own images.

Prompt: DMCA takedown notice

I own the copyright to a photo that has been posted on a website without my permission. Write a proper DMCA takedown notice I can send to the site and its host. Leave blanks for the image URL, where it is posted, and my contact info, and include the standard good-faith and accuracy statements a DMCA notice requires.

If it is on a social platform. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the rest have built-in reporting for photos of you posted without consent, and for impersonation. Use their report tools first, it is the fastest path. Claude can write the explanation you paste into the report.

If someone else owns the photo. If a photographer or company took it, you may not hold the copyright, so DMCA may not apply. You can still ask the site to remove it as a personal privacy request, and many will.

Prompt: photo removal request

Write a polite but firm request asking a website to remove a photo of me that I did not consent to have posted. Frame it as a personal privacy request. Leave blanks for the page URL and a short description of the photo.

Google can hide outdated photos too. If a photo was already taken down from a site but still shows in Google, use Google's "Remove outdated content" tool to clear the leftover result. Quick cleanup for images that are gone from the source but hanging around in search.

Cleanup is half the job. The other half is closing the doors that let your info leak out in the first place, so you are not doing this again in six months.

• Kill old accounts you do not use. Every dead account is a data leak waiting to happen. Old forums, shopping sites, apps you tried once. Delete the ones you do not need.
• Tighten your social privacy settings. Set profiles to private, hide your friends list and birthday, and remove your location and contact info from public view. This is where a lot of your exposed data originally came from.
• Strip location data from photos. Photos can carry hidden EXIF data, including the GPS location where they were taken. Turn off location tagging in your camera app, and be aware that posting straight from a phone can leak where you live.
• Use a forwarding email and a masked number for signups. Stop feeding the brokers. Use an alias email and a masked phone number for store signups, loyalty programs, and random accounts. Your real details stay out of the pipeline.

Prompt: build my lockdown checklist

Build me a personal privacy lockdown checklist: old accounts to close, social settings to change, phone and camera settings to adjust, and habits to stop feeding data brokers. Keep it to things I can actually finish in an afternoon.

Set a reminder. Brokers slowly re-add you as they buy fresh data. Put a recurring reminder on your calendar to re-run your name search every few months and re-opt-out of anything that crept back. Twenty minutes, twice a year, keeps you clean.

1. See it. Search yourself, reverse-search key photos, set Google Alerts. Claude lists the exact searches and sites to check.
2. Scrub Google. Use Results about you to pull results from search. Claude drafts any manual removal request.
3. Opt out. Remove yourself from the big people-search sites. Claude builds the plan and writes the deletion requests.
4. Photos. DMCA your own images, report the rest. Claude writes the takedown notices and removal requests.
5. Lock down. Close old accounts, tighten settings, stop the leaks. Claude builds your lockdown checklist.

The prompts worth saving:

1. "Give me a checklist of searches to run on myself and the people-search sites to look for."
2. "Build me a prioritized opt-out plan for the biggest data broker sites."
3. "Write a data deletion request I can email to a people-search site." (Add your state or country.)
4. "Write a DMCA takedown notice for a photo I own that was posted without permission."
5. "Build me a privacy lockdown checklist I can finish in an afternoon."

You cannot vanish completely. You can get a whole lot harder to find.