Removing Yourself from Whitepages
Recently, I found myself wanting to know a bit more about a new colleague at work’s professional background. So what did I do? What most of us are in the habit of doing when we want to know more about a person: I googled their name. Immediately, I found their LinkedIn profile with the information I was looking for as the top search result. But just after that, as a second search result, was their current home address, family members’ names, age range and more personal information from Whitepages. Although I hadn’t even had the chance to meet in person with that colleague, I knew a lot more than I would want them to know about myself.
Thanks to “people search engines”, information we would never share freely with a stranger can easily be found online. In this series, I will be going over how to remove yourself from these types of websites. First up is one of the most popular people search engines: Whitepages. This process shouldn’t take more than 5 to 7 minutes.
To remove yourself from Whitepages, you will first need to search for yourself by entering your name and location in the site’s search bar.
Then, find the result which matches your information, and click “View Details”. Copy the URL in the address bar, as you’ll need it for the next step.
Navigate to the Whitepages opt-out page located at https://www.whitepages.com/suppression_requests. Paste your URL, and click “Opt-Out”.
The website will then ask to confirm your removal. Continue by clicking “Remove Me”.
You will then be required to select a reason as to why you wish to have your information removed. Optionally, you can leave a comment if you wish to add an explanation as to why you don’t want complete strangers to easily find your address.
Unfortunately, Whitepages will require you to supply a valid phone number in order to complete the removal process. Should you prefer not to give the website your actual phone number, a Google Voice number will work, even if it isn’t the phone number listed on your results page.
Once supplied, you will be shown a 4-digit number on the screen. An automated system will then call you from a 415 area code and ask that you provide the shown number.
When I removed my personal information from the website, I was happy to see that it also removed any mention of my name when I searched for my spouse’s name the next day, as my information was taken down in less than 24 hours.
Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that your information will never reappear on Whitepages in the future. I suggest creating a Google alert by going to https://www.google.com/alerts, and entering an alert for site:whitepages.com “Your Name”. That way, should your search results be repopulated, you’ll receive a notification.
One More Thing: If you are like me and have a last name which gets misspelled by people or can be spelled in various ways, make sure to repeat the removal process with those possibilities. I found I had two search results in total which needed to be removed.
