Follow these step-by-step instructions on how to opt out of BeenVerified, the people search website and clear your personal information from the internet.
BeenVerified sells itself as the “everyday information company” that paints the people search website business as a common good. We aren’t here to argue there aren’t legitimate uses for these sites. But, they are an intrusion into privacy for most people. How to opt out of BeenVerified is not an incredibly complicated process, thankfully.
If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you found your personal information hosted on beenverified.com. You may have come across this page while performing a search of your own name on Google. Or found it on another search engine and found results listing your address, phone number, age and more.
Like many people, you probably aren’t thrilled about this.
Unfortunately, there are dozens if not hundreds of people search websites just like BeenVerified that do business by scraping the internet and public records. They are collecting personal information from citizens and creating profiles for them in these people search directories.
It is an entirely legal process but morally questionable for those who value privacy.
What is Beenverified.com?
BeenVerified was founded in 2007 and its stated goal is to “provide you with access to public information that was formerly only available to big companies and people with deep pockets in a way that is easy, affordable, and fast.”
The people finder has approximately 18 million visitors each month and features a database of 200 million people. As of 2020, there were 331,449,281 million official residents in the United States for reference.
While BeenVerified might not be as advanced as services such as LexisNexis, the search engine is powerful. The service allows people to conduct eight types of searches: person search, vehicle search, phone search, address search, email search, social media search, unclaimed money search and business search.
Free accounts let anyone search for names, ages, location, family members and aliases. Premium paid accounts let users go into more detail search for phone numbers, criminal records, address history, VIN lookup, social media search and license plate searches.
More than 500,000 users were paying for the service as of 2021, according to BeenVerified and there have been more than 200,000,000 searches.
Users have downloaded the app 7 million times.
How to opt out of BeenVerified
Opting out of BeenVerified follows a similar process as other people search websites. It is a relatively painless process that requires approximately 15 minutes of your time to complete.
While this doesn’t sound like much, the issue is the dozens of other people search websites out there that more or less provide the same information. To truly delete your personal information from people search websites, you would have to manually complete this process for each and every website.
There is enough way (cough, cough). Privacy Bee can do the work for you as part of its premium membership.
If you are willing to put in the hard work, follow these steps on how to remove yourself completely from people search websites.
Follow these steps on how to opt out of BeenVerified:
- Start by entering your first and last name in the opt-out page of BeenVerified.com.
- Next, search through the results and find the record that matches your information and age.
- Once you locate yourself, you will be asked to submit your opt-out request by entering your email.
- Check your email for the verification email
- Click Verify Opt-Out in the verification email
Please note that it may take up to 24 hours for the opt-out to be registered and go into effect.
The next steps to take control of your privacy
If you have problems where your data remains on the site after 24 hours or returns in a few days or months, you should contact [email protected].
Now that you have taken the steps to opt out of BeenVerified, it’s time to move on to the other people search websites. As we mentioned earlier, this will take some serious time, but at the end of the day, it’s worth it.
To further clear up your online footprint and practice good digital hygiene, you should also opt out of data brokers. This is another time-consuming process but will pay dividends when you no longer receive spam in the mail, marketing calls and more. Follow our guide on how to remove yourself from data broker websites.
After that, the next step would be working to remove yourself from the internet. Here’s our list of 5 tools to help remove yourself and your personal information from the internet.
To take things a step further, you can let us handle opt-outs on your behalf with Privacy Bee’s premium privacy protection.
