This wasn’t necessarily what I wanted my next post to be, but if I can even do a little bit to help given the unfortunate events in the gaming community this weekend, then so be it.
Ken Gagne from Gamebits was kind enough to send this list of sites to me and it’s a good resource for making sure your personal information isn’t easy for people with unkind motives to obtain. Some sites are more difficult to opt out from than others, but given that it’s your safety, it’s worth your time.
The most important one from this list is Spokeo; it’s relatively easy to opt out from, though you’ll need to search for yourself and provide the URL. The rest of the list is various levels of sketchy and some require additional information you may not want to provide to a random site, so proceed with caution.
http://www.spokeo.com/opt_out/new
http://www.checkpeople.com/optout
https://pipl.com/directory/remove/
https://www.peoplesmart.com/optout
http://www.zoominfo.com/lookupEmail
https://www.intelius.com/optout.php
http://www.zabasearch.com/block_records/
http://www.publicrecords360.com/optout.html
http://www.whitepagescustomers.com/how-do-i-remove-my-people-search-profile/
UPDATE: Ken’s collected all of this information into a feature story on Computerworld.