How to Opt Out of Spokeo (and Other Data Brokers)

What Spokeo is and why it has your data

Spokeo is a people-search data broker: it collects publicly available and commercially purchased records and makes them searchable. A typical profile pulls in contact information, address history, relatives, social accounts, and sometimes estimated income or property data.

Brokers like Spokeo do not need a direct relationship with you to hold your data. They draw from government records (property transfers, voter rolls, court filings), commercial sources (loyalty programs, warranty registrations), partner data-sharing agreements, and other brokers. Once your details are in the pipeline, they circulate. The FTC documented the scale in an early landmark review: one broker in that study held data on more than 1.4 billion consumer transactions and over 700 billion data elements, while another added more than 3 billion new data points per month. Around the same period, an FTC commissioner described Acxiom as holding information on about 700 million active consumers worldwide, with some 1,500 data points per person.

Spokeo is one layer of that ecosystem: the consumer-facing end where a profile becomes searchable by name. The same data also flows to background-check services, marketing platforms, and other brokers you cannot see.

Opt out, step by step

Spokeo's opt-out tool is at spokeo.com/optout. The process uses a URL-based approach: you find your own listing first, then submit that URL to the removal form rather than entering personal details directly.

1. Go to spokeo.com and search for yourself by name and city. If you have a common name, filter by state or age to narrow results.
2. Open the listing that matches you. Copy the full URL from your browser's address bar, for example https://www.spokeo.com/FirstName-LastName/State/City/XXXXXX.
3. Go to spokeo.com/optout. Paste the copied URL into the listing field.
4. Enter an email address to receive the confirmation. This is where a disposable address is worth using: the TempMailSpot inbox generates one in a second, no sign-up required. Using a throwaway here means the confirmation request itself does not hand Spokeo a fresh, real address they can retain.
5. Submit the form. Spokeo sends a confirmation email to the address you provided. Open it and click the confirmation link. Once confirmed, Spokeo removes the listing from public search results.

Spokeo's own privacy policy confirms the tool exists and notes that it processed 665,907 opt-out requests in calendar year 2024, complying with 656,115 of them. It also notes the removal covers public search listings but cannot reach the underlying third-party sources, such as government records or phone books, that originally supplied the data.

A note on repeating: if you have multiple listings (different cities, different data combos), each one needs its own submission. Run the search a few times and handle each result separately.

It comes back: re-checking and the bigger routine

A Spokeo removal is not permanent. Brokers re-acquire data from public sources on a rolling basis, so a profile you removed can reappear within months when a new public-records pull brings it back. The sensible response is to treat it as a recurring task: search for yourself every three to six months and resubmit if your listing is back.

The longer-term fix is prevention. An email address that never enters low-trust signups, sweepstakes entries, or marketing lists has less raw material to feed the broker pipeline. A disposable address handles the one-time signups where you need to receive a link but have no reason to stay connected. Because the throwaway inbox expires, it cannot accumulate into a marketing profile the way a real address does.

The regulated side of this is also shifting. California's Delete Act created the DROP platform, which as of January 2026 lets California residents submit a single deletion request to all registered data brokers at once through the California Privacy Protection Agency. For residents of other states, the manual per-broker process is still the path.

Spokeo is one broker. The addresses, phone numbers, and details it holds are also held by Whitepages, BeenVerified, Intelius, and dozens of others. Repeating this process across the full list is the actual job. Our data broker opt-out guide covers that wider routine, including the large marketing brokers whose data feeds the people-search layer, what the CCPA and GDPR let you demand in writing, and when paying an automated removal service is worth the cost.