Data broker removal guide + state law map

Not legal advice. This page is a research guide built from official sources and the sites' own pages, checked on the date shown. It does not apply any law to your situation. For advice, talk to a licensed attorney in your state.

Panda Federation does not submit forms for you, does not ask for your personal details, and is not paid by any site listed here. You open every link and fill every form yourself.

Order of steps

1. Inventory first. List the emails, phone numbers and old accounts you still control. Search each inbox for sign-up and marketing mail to find forgotten accounts.
2. Delete old accounts while you can still sign in. Some sites only accept deletion from a signed-in session. Finish those before you close the email address that gets their codes.
3. Find your listings and confirm they are you. Common names pull up other people. Only opt out of a record that is actually yours.
4. Opt out at the official link, in your own browser. Use the links below. Captchas often fail in automated or remote browsers, so open them yourself.
5. Click verification emails right away. Links commonly expire in 24 hours, and some much sooner. One in our testing expired in about 15 minutes.
6. Save the receipt. Keep the confirmation email or screenshot. Log the result from that message, not from memory. A reply that says denied is easy to misread as done.
7. Recheck later. Look again after the window the site gives (often 3 days), then every month or two. Listings can come back when new public records arrive.

Pitfalls

• Never pay a people-search site to remove you. Their opt-outs are free.
• Delete linked accounts before you delete an old email address.
• Where you live matters. Many sites only grant formal privacy rights to residents of states with a comprehensive privacy law. Everyone else gets a courtesy opt-out, if that.
• Most state laws exclude publicly available information, such as government records. That is what many listings are built from, so a legal deletion right may not force a takedown.
• Do not misstate your state of residence on a form.
• If an account-deletion email tells you not to sign back in, don't. Signing in can cancel the deletion on some sites.

Official opt-out links

Checked November 10, 2026. “Bot check” means our automated check hit a captcha or firewall. The address is still the site's own opt-out path, so open it in your own browser.

Opt out here

Rights depend on your state

SmartBackgroundChecks, USPhonebook and FastPeopleSearch publish near-identical privacy notices. They say your privacy rights depend on your state of residence and point residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws to a supplemental notice. They take requests through a web form or by phone. They also say their data is publicly available information, which they consider outside state privacy laws, and that they apply opt-outs to it as a courtesy. If you live in a state without a comprehensive law, such as Arizona, expect a formal privacy request to be refused. The opt-out form is still worth trying.

Official state tool

Skip these

State law map: who has a legal right to deletion

19 states have a comprehensive privacy law in effect with a right to delete. Florida's narrow law adds a deletion right that reaches only very large companies. Oklahoma and Louisiana start January 1, 2027, Alabama May 1, 2027, and Vermont January 1, 2028. California's free DROP tool sends one deletion request to registered data brokers, for California residents only.

The catch: most of these laws exclude publicly available information, such as government records, from the data they cover. People-search listings are largely built from those records, so a deletion right may not force a takedown. Sites often apply opt-outs to that data only as a courtesy.

Arizona

Arizona has no comprehensive consumer privacy law, so Arizona residents have no general legal right to make a people-search site delete a listing. The Arizona Attorney General's consumer pages cover data-breach notice, not deletion, and SB 1815 (2026) was only introduced. Arizona residents can still use each site's free opt-out form. Many sites honor those as a courtesy. Sites that tie formal rights to state law may refuse.

Arkansas: we found no enacted comprehensive privacy law. Some sites cite “Act 549 of 2023,” but the official Act 549 is a firearms bill.

“Statute text not yet re-read by us” means we confirmed the law and its date but have not yet saved the official text of the deletion section. We check this map monthly. Full notes and every source URL are in state-law-map.json.

Tracking checklist

One row per site. Fill it in from receipts, not memory.

Data and copies

This page exposes read-only WebMCP tools for AI assistants: get_state_rights, list_optout_sites, list_states_with_rights, get_removal_steps, get_links. They only read the data on this page.