All of Your Information That’s Publicly Available (and What You Can Do About It)

It’s one thing to be vaguely aware that privacy no longer really exists. We live in a world filled with doorbell cameras, so your chances of turning up in random TikToks or YouTube videos are never zero, after all. But most people assume that there’s a clear line between what we consider our personal business and the information available in public records. But the truth is that line isn’t much of a line at all—you don’t have to be a billionaire with a private jet to experience the joys of public records.

If you’ve ever Googled an old school friend out of curiosity you’ve probably gotten a bunch of results back from sites like Spokeo or Whitepages promising to generate a report that lists everything about that person. Maybe you thought it was a scam, but those sites can actually offer you a ton of information about just about anyone, because there’s a lot more information about you in public—and publicly accessible—records than you might think.

The truth is out there

So what’s in public records? A lot. The basics—your name, birthday, home address—certainly. But also most probably stuff like

• your driver’s license number and status

• your Social Security number

• traffic fines and accidents

• your voter registration

• your marital status

• your home address

• employment history

• your photo and physical description

• the names of your immediate relatives, spouse, and children

• property records including liens, foreclosures, and mortgages

• arrest records

Some of this is obvious. If you’ve ever maintained a LinkedIn profile, your work history, photo, and contact info was likely scraped and repackaged. If you list your home for sale, everyone in your neighborhood can know about it immediately when your house shows up on Trulia or Zillow.

But you might imagine that things you don’t voluntarily post online would remain private. For example, if you get into financial trouble and your home is foreclosed on, you’re probably not posting that to Facebook with a frowny face emoji, so you might expect it to remain private. But you’d be wrong. If someone wants to know if you’re in foreclosure on your home, it’s very easy to find all that information, too. By triangulating mortgage, foreclosure, and court records you can assemble a pretty clear picture of someone’s financial state without violating a single law.

One reason this is so easy? The government is actively selling your information via that beloved institution: The DMV. In order to obtain a driver’s license, you have to submit a lot of personal information to your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles or equivalent, and they actively and enthusiastically sell that information to third parties. That alone makes it insanely easy to find out most of this stuff. And anything classified as a public record is legally accessible by anyone—otherwise it wouldn’t be considered public.

Reclaiming privacy

So details about your life are in public records. What can you do about it?

Not a ton. Agencies like the DMV aren’t going to scrub your personal data because they need that to perform their function, and they’re not going to stop selling your data until the laws change. And once information from social media is scraped, there is no way to unscrape it. But there are a few things you can do to remove private information from at least some public records:

• People-search sites. You probably know about sites like Spokeo, Intelius, or WhitePages where you can search public records for people. These sites often have a surprising amount of information available about you. They also all offer tools to have your information removed from their database, so you can often search for opt-out pages and privacy tools pages on those sites to scrub some of your information from the Internet.

• Remove unused profiles. If you have old social media profiles or online memberships that you no longer use, remove them. Most platforms offer some form of account removal, and getting this data off the public-facing Internet is a small step towards controlling the publicly available information about you. While you’re at it, switch social media accounts to private if you can.

  You should also reach out to the Internet Archive. This invaluable service preserves web pages for posterity, but old social media profiles, personal websites, and other artifacts of your prior online lives are often preserved as well. You can request their removal pretty easily, but the Archive warns it makes no guarantee it will comply.

• Contact government agencies, banks, and other entities. It can be extremely difficult to remove public information from government sites, but there are some actions you can pursue. Many states will obscure or block your voter registration information if you fit certain criteria, for example. If you resolve a foreclosure, you can (and should!) ask your lender to remove the Notice of Default, though this may not propagate to real estate sites in a timely manner (or at all). You can also try to get real estate listings of your home taken down, and you can ask Google to blur your house, though sites like Zillow probably won’t be willing to remove your home from their database. Depending on where you live, you may be able to request that identifiable information like phone numbers and Social Security numbers be removed from public records. You can visit your local County Clerk and ask to see the public records you appear in, and request their removal. Your mileage will vary.

That’s about all you can do. Public records are persistent and play a vital role in local governance, so you won’t be able to remove everything—and the stuff you might be able to remove will require a lot of work.

And then constant vigilance, because the chances that your information just pops up again some time later are pretty good. To combat that, you can consider paying for a service like DeleteMe or PrivacyBee, which will monitor people search sites and other online repositories for your personal information and automatically request its removal. These services cost money (ranging from $8 to $20 per month), but knowing someone is opting you out of online databases on your behalf can help you sleep at night.

Just being aware of what’s out there is useful, though. At least you’ll know just how little privacy you actually have, and what people can find out about you with minimal effort.