All Your Information That’s Publicly Available (and What You Can Do With It)
It’s one thing to be vaguely aware that privacy no longer exists. We live in a world filled with doorbell cameras , so your chances of ending up in random TikToks or YouTube videos are never zero . But most people believe that there is a clear line between what we consider private and the information available in public records. But the truth is that this line is not a line at all: you don’t have to be a billionaire with a private jet to experience the joy of public reporting.
If you’ve ever Googled an old high school friend out of curiosity, you’ve probably gotten a bunch of results from sites like Spokeo or Whitepages , promising to create a report that will tell you everything about that person. You might think it’s a scam, but in reality these sites can offer you a ton of information about just about anyone because there’s a lot more information about you in public (and public) records than you think.
The truth is somewhere near
So what is in public records? A lot of . Basic information – your name, birthday, home address – of course. But also most likely things like
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your driver’s license number and status
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your social security number
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fines for traffic violations and accidents
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your voter registration
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your marital status
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your home address
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Employment history
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your photo and physical description
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names of your immediate family, spouse and children
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property records, including liens, foreclosures and mortgages
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arrest records
Some of this is obvious. If you’ve ever maintained a LinkedIn profile, your work history, photo, and contact information have likely been scrubbed and repackaged. If you list your home for sale, everyone in your area will know about it as soon as your home appears on Trulia or Zillow.
But you can imagine that things you don’t voluntarily post online will remain private. For example, if you’re having financial problems and your house is foreclosed on, you probably aren’t posting it on Facebook with a frown emoji on your face, so you can expect it to remain private. But you are wrong. If anyone wants to know if you are in foreclosure on your home, all of this information is very easy to find too. By triangulating mortgages, foreclosures, and court records, you can get a pretty clear picture of someone’s financial status without breaking any laws.
One of the reasons why it’s so easy? The government actively sells your information through a favorite agency: the DMV . To get a driver’s license, you need to provide a lot of personal information to your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles or its equivalent, and they actively and enthusiastically sell this information to third parties. This alone makes it insanely easy to learn most of these things. And anything that is classified as a public record is legally available to everyone—otherwise it would not be considered public record.
Restoring privacy
So, the details of your life are in public records. What can you do about it?
Not a ton. Agencies like the DMV aren’t going to delete your personal data because they need it to do their job, and they’re not going to stop selling your data until the laws change. And once information from social networks is cleared, it is no longer possible to restore it. But there are a few things you can do to remove personal information from at least some public records:
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People search sites. You’re probably aware of sites like Spokeo, Intelius, or WhitePages where you can search for people in public posts. These sites often contain a surprising amount of information about you. They all also offer tools to remove your information from their database, so you can often search these sites for opt-out pages and privacy tool pages to remove some of your information from the Internet.
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Remove unused profiles. If you have old social media profiles or online memberships that you no longer use, delete them. Most platforms offer some form of account deletion, and removing this data from the public internet is a small step toward taking control of publicly available information about you. While you’re at it, switch your social media accounts to private if possible.
You should also check out the Internet Archive. This invaluable service preserves web pages for posterity, but it often also preserves old social media profiles, personal websites, and other artifacts of your previous online life. You can quite easily request their removal , but the Archive cautions that it makes no guarantee that it will comply.
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Contact government agencies, banks and other organizations. Removing public information from government sites can be extremely difficult, but there are some steps you can take. Many states hide or block your voter registration information, for example, if you meet certain criteria. If you are allowing a foreclosure, you can (and should!) ask your lender to remove the Notice of Default, although this may not apply to real estate sites in a timely manner (or at all). You can also try to remove real estate listings for your home and ask Google to blur your home , although sites like Zillow probably won’t want to remove your home from their database. Depending on where you live, you may be able to request that identifying information such as phone numbers and Social Security numbers be removed from public records . You can contact your local county clerk and ask to see the public records in which you appear and request that they be removed. Your mileage will vary.
That’s all you can do. Public records are permanent and play a vital role in local government, so you won’t be able to remove everything, and what you may be able to remove will require a lot of work.
And then constant vigilance, because the likelihood that your information will come up again after a while is quite high. To combat this, you might 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 ($8 to $20 per month), but knowing that someone is disabling access to online databases on your behalf can help you sleep at night.
However, just knowing what’s going on is helpful. At the very least, you’ll know how little privacy you really have and what people can find out about you with minimal effort.