I've joined Bighound. What happens now?

Four steps, and the first three take about five minutes.

1. Add yourself

Bighound can’t find you without knowing who to look for. At minimum: your first and last name. Everything beyond that makes the results sharper — see why we ask for so much.

2. Add a birth year

Optional, and the single highest-value field you can give us. Broker listings print an age next to every record, so a birth year is what separates you from a relative who shares your name and your address. Without it, a father and son in the same house are indistinguishable to us and you’ll get both.

We ask for the year only. Never a full date of birth — that’s a credential for opening credit in someone’s name, and a year does the job.

3. Run a scan

The scan checks four things:

• People-search sites — the broker listings that publish your address and phone
• Breach corpora — whether your email appears in a known breach
• The open web — pages that mention you by name alongside something identifying
• Username sites — public accounts tied to a handle you gave us

It takes a few minutes. You’ll get a notification when it’s done if you’ve enabled them.

What leaves Bighound during a scan

Finding you means asking the places that might hold your data, so some of it has to be sent out to run the check — there’s no version of “are you exposed?” that never leaves our server:

• Your email address goes to a breach-index provider (see breach monitoring).
• Your name and location go to a search engine, so we can find pages and profiles that mention you. We run this through a self-hosted search proxy so no commercial provider builds a query log tied to your account — but the search terms still reach the engines it queries.

That’s the honest trade: to tell you where you’re exposed, we have to look you up the same way anyone else would. What we don’t do is keep more than the result, or send more than the check needs.

4. Work the list

Each finding gets a Remove me button that shows you exactly what that broker’s form asks for, filled in from your own record, one tap to copy each field.

Bighound does not submit removals for you. That’s not a gap we’re working on — it’s the design. See is Bighound automated?.

What your first scan will look like

Expect more results than you’re comfortable with, and expect some of them not to be you. The list is sorted so the confident matches come first and loose name-matches are hidden behind a “needs review” toggle. That’s deliberate: we’d rather show you a stranger than hide a real exposure.