Why this is worth an hour of your time
If someone wants to find you — an ex, an online date gone wrong, a stalker — they usually start the same way you would: they search your name. EFF’s guide to managing your digital footprint puts it plainly: most information available about people online sits in one of two places — sites where you posted it yourself (social media, forum comments, old classifieds) or data brokers who collected it from public records and resold it. The point of a self-audit isn’t paranoia. It’s mapping your own exposure the way someone hunting for you would, so you find the gaps first.
If you already know someone specific is looking for you, or you’re worried that changing accounts or deleting posts right now could tip them off, read Safety first before you act on anything below. Some of these steps — closing an old account, removing a broker listing — are safe for almost everyone. Others, like changing a shared account an abuser also has access to, can escalate risk if done at the wrong time.
Search your name the way a stranger would
Do this in a private/incognito browser window, or logged out of your Google account — otherwise personalized results and your own search history can skew what you see.
- Name plus city. Search your full name with your current city, then again with any city you’ve lived in before. This surfaces old listings, news mentions, and directory entries tied to a specific place.
- Name plus employer. Your name with your current or past workplace often turns up staff directories, press releases, LinkedIn, or conference bios you forgot existed.
- Name plus known usernames or nicknames. If you have a reused handle — a gamer tag, an old forum name — search that too, paired with your real name, to see if anyone has ever linked the two publicly.
- Quoted, exact-phrase searches. Put your name in quotation marks to cut down on false matches, and try combinations like your name with a phone number or old address.
Note everything you find, including the URL and what it exposes. You’ll use this list later.
Reverse image search your profile photos
If your face is attached to a username or a dating profile, reverse image search can show you where else it may have appeared — including places you never posted it, like a scraped dating profile or a catfishing account using your picture.
On desktop, go to Google Images, click the camera icon, and either upload the photo or paste its image URL. On mobile, in the Chrome app you can touch and hold an image on a website and tap “Search image with Google Lens” (Google Search Help). Once results load, you can use the visual matches to see other places the same or a similar image appears online.
Do this for your main profile photo on any dating app, social account, or professional site, and for any photo someone else may have posted of you.
Check for username reuse and old accounts
Most people reuse the same handle across several sites without thinking about it. That’s convenient for you to remember and just as convenient for someone piecing together your accounts. Search your usernames the way you searched your name — in quotes, paired with terms like “profile” or a platform name — and note every account that comes up, especially old ones you forgot to delete.
Old MySpace pages, forum threads, Reddit comments under a name tied to you, and abandoned dating profiles rarely disappear on their own. If you use a password manager, scrolling through its saved logins is often the fastest way to remember accounts you’ve forgotten you ever made. For each one you find still live, decide whether to delete it, lock it down, or leave it — but make the decision deliberately instead of by default.
A page can also be deleted from a live site and still be recoverable elsewhere. If a search result links to somewhere now gone, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine exists specifically to let you look up whether an earlier snapshot of that page was saved — useful for confirming what was actually posted about you.
Use Google’s “Results about you” tool
Google runs a dedicated feature called “Results about you” that scans Google Search for pages containing your personal contact information and lets you request their removal from search results. Here’s what it actually does, according to Google’s own help documentation:
Setting it up. In the Google app, tap your profile picture, then select “Results about you.” On mobile web or desktop, go to the Results about you page and select “Get started” or “Settings.” You enter your name and the personal info you want checked — the form also accepts a nickname, maiden name, and multiple phone numbers, home addresses, and email addresses, plus a Social Security number, passport number, or driver’s license number.
Getting notified. Turn on email or Google-app notifications and you’ll get one within a few hours telling you whether anything already matches, then further notifications whenever new matches appear.
Reviewing and requesting removal. Flagged results land in the “To review” tab; selecting one shows the website it came from and which piece of your info it contains. Select a result to expand “Request to remove,” or choose “Mark as reviewed” if you’d rather not act on it. Google confirms your request and sends status updates by email, and you can check status anytime under “Removal requests,” shown as in progress, approved, denied, or undone.
What it won’t remove. Google “considers some results valuable to the public” and won’t offer a “Remove result” option for pages on sites it treats that way — its own examples are government and educational websites, newspapers, and business websites.
What removal actually means. Even an approved request only affects what shows up in Google Search — it doesn’t touch the page itself. If you want the content gone from the site that published it, you have to contact that site directly, a point the EFF guide also makes: approval from Google “doesn’t mean the website that hosts that data deletes anything,” and the same information can still surface through other search engines.
You can also report a result directly from Google Search: click “More” next to it, select “Remove result,” then “It shows my personal info and I don’t want it there,” then “Contact Info,” and follow the reporting flow (Google Search Help).
Set a Google Alert on your name
A Google Alert emails you whenever Google finds new matching search results for a term you choose, including mentions of your name (Google Search Help). Go to Google Alerts, enter your name in the box at the top, and select “Create Alert.” Click “Show options” first if you want to adjust how often you’re notified, which kinds of sites are included, or how many results you see per alert. This won’t catch everything, but it means a new public mention of your name doesn’t sit undiscovered for months.
What to do with what you found
Once you have your list — old accounts, broker listings, reused usernames, stray photos — work through it in a realistic order rather than fixing everything at once:
- Delete or lock down old accounts you no longer use, starting with any still showing current information like your city or workplace.
- Tighten the profiles you’re keeping. See Social media lockdown for platform-specific privacy settings.
- File broker opt-outs for the people-search sites that surfaced your name. See How people-search sites expose your address for how well opt-outs actually work, and the Data Broker Directory to check specific companies.
- Re-run this search in a few months. Broker listings and cached pages tend to reappear, so a one-time cleanup fades.
None of this guarantees you become unfindable — someone with enough time and money can still piece together a lot. What it does is close the easy paths: the account anyone could find in five minutes, the photo linking two profiles you meant to keep separate, the broker listing with your current address on the first page of results. That’s the exposure most people never think to check, and it’s exactly where a casual searcher starts.