Why do I need to provide so much personal information?
It’s a fair thing to be suspicious about. You came here to get your personal information off the internet, and the first thing we do is ask for it.
The honest answer
Section titled “The honest answer”We can’t find a record without knowing what it looks like. A broker listing is just a name, an age, and some addresses. To decide whether a given “M. Guillory, 52, Peoria AZ” is you or a stranger, we have to compare it against something. The more we can compare, the fewer strangers end up on your list — and the fewer of your records we miss.
Concretely:
| What you give us | What it buys you |
|---|---|
| Full name | The bare minimum to search at all |
| City / state | Turns a loose name match into a confident one |
| Birth year | Separates you from relatives who share your name |
| Email addresses | Finds breach exposure; a verbatim match is near-certain |
| Phone numbers | Same — two people don’t share a number |
| Usernames | Finds public accounts tied back to your legal name |
What we do about the risk
Section titled “What we do about the risk”- Everything is encrypted at rest, per-field, with a key derived per account. Your record isn’t sitting in a database column someone can read.
- We refuse some fields outright — full date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s licence, passport, financial account numbers. Not “we handle them carefully”: we won’t store them at all. See what we refuse to store.
- You can delete all of it, permanently, from your account page, without asking us.
What we can’t promise
Section titled “What we can’t promise”We can’t promise a breach is impossible. Nobody honestly can. What we can tell you is exactly what would be in one — and it’s deliberately less than the companies you’re trying to escape already publish about you for free.