Listen up! This is required reading for all Crack Team agents. A sharp agent in the field1 has documented how to remove yourself from all background check web sites. This is your first step in erasing your background and living off the grid!
Actually, this only goes so far. An employee from one of the companies in that list offered the following informative comment:
All of this data is public data. The data itself isn’t going away, opting out just makes people who want to find it have to look a little harder. As an example, I live in Washington State. The state provides a site to search through public records. From here I can directly see my marriage license and the land I own.
What these sites do is take all of this publicly available information (address history, phone numbers, marriage records, death records, criminal history, etc…) and consolidates it. Some sites with more success then others. Often this data is quite vague, and it can be very difficult to actually tie a record back to a specific person. The amount and accuracy of data on these sites is dependent on how “active” you are to the public eye. Get married a lot, have multiple crimes, there’s a pretty good chance the data on you will be quite full. But if you have a fairly low public footprint (young and single with few addresses and no criminal record) the data my be somewhat spotty, especially if you have a fairly common name.
The common name thing is a bit of a problem for me. Looks like when it’s time to go underground to escape the bad guys, I’m changing my name to James Smith.
- Note this comes from someone with the handle LawyerCT. [↩]