PeekYou is a people search engine that collects and posts all kinds of personal information about the American and Canadian public online. Reportedly founded in 2006 by Michael Hussey, PeekYou claims to have indexed over a quarter of a billion people and sorts and categorizes their links and personal data. The search results are built from publicly available URLs, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google, blogs, homepages, business pages and news sources, among others, so always be careful about what you post about yourself online.
These types of data collection services do sometimes provide some valued benefits to the public. For example, if you're concerned about somebody you're dating or a job seeker or home worker, being able to do some kind of background check on them can help protect you. But for most people in most cases, you don't want your personal information accessible online
If you want to remove your phone number from PeekYou.com, here's how you can do that and protect yourself from the data brokers for free. Just follow the how-to steps in the instructions below.
1. Go to PeekYou's website and search for your profile.
2. PeekYou aggregates information from several sites so make sure that you click on your PeekYou listing.
3. Click the opt-out button on your account page.
4. Fill out your first and last name, email, and enter the final digits of your listing’s url as the unique ID. Make
5. Solve the CAPTCHA, check any boxes, and submit the form.
6. You will receive an email to confirm the removal.
7. If all goes well, you will get an email in 24-72 hours saying that your listing was removed.
8. Do the search again and double check that your background check information was deleted.
Managing your personal internet appearances and reputation like this is a time-consuming, but valuable task that can help you get better jobs, avoid identity theft, and reduce your Internet footprint, and your real world risk level. You can always do this yourself of course, but if you don't want to spend the time needed to navigate PeekYou and the many other data brokers' confusing forms, monitor them for compliance, and continuously do searches to ensure that your data is off of these sites, you can instead use a reputable privacy service to ensure that your phone number is removed from the Internet permanently. It is always your choice whether or not to do this, but taking care of your Internet safety can help you out immensely in the long run.
We hope you enjoyed reading this guide and learned something new! Check out our Learning Center to learn more about online privacy and security or consider subscribing to our Online Privacy Service to remove your phone number, name, and address from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo search results and hundreds of data broker sites.