The best spam email blocker is not getting spammed in the first place. Here’s how to prevent spam email (or at least reduce the amount of spam you are getting) by removing your personal information from the Internet. You may already know this, but here in the United States, where the privacy laws are so lax, it’s perfectly legal for a company to scrape all of your contact information and then sell access to it. ZoomInfo, Spokeo, Crunchbase, Apollo.io, and RocketReach all do this, as do many others. And removing your data from those databases can help to reduce the amount of spam email that you receive. We’re going to tell you how to remove yourself from these top 5 sites, and then we’re going to tell you about a service that will remove you from all the sites (more than 500 of them), if you want to go in that direction.
Here’s the thing, if you live in the U.S., and you are on the Internet (and you are, or you wouldn’t be reading this) these places have your personal information, make no mistake about it. Efforts to enact a strict Federal privacy law have gone essentially nowhere, leading, inevitably, to a patchwork of state privacy laws being introduced (and some passed). Very little of it has made a difference though, especially when it comes to spam. And that is why we have put together this article outlining how to remove your personal information yourself at some of the top offenders, as well as information on a service that does it for you at more than 500 (seriously!) data brokers, databases, and data banks. (You can check out that service now if you just want to let them do it for you, we get it, and we’ve arranged a 20% discount for you).
How to Remove Your Personal Information from the Internet
How to Remove Your Personal Information from Apollo.io
Apollo.io says that they respect your privacy, which is so ironic that it’s almost funny (almost, but not quite) as right now, at least in our world, they are one of the largest offenders, by which we mean as a spam-enabler because a lot of companies are using them to import your email address so that they can spam you. This is a company that openly brags that “Our global data is now yours”, with “verified email addresses, phone numbers, and direct dials” for the asking (of course, pay up first). They even brag about scraping data, saying that “Our data comes from dozens of verified sources. We scrape from hundreds of millions of websites, use machine learning algorithms, and utilize a proprietary data network of over 500,000 contributors each day.”
Frightening, isn’t it?
You can ask Apollo.io to remove your scraped data here.
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How to Remove Your Personal Data from Crunchbase
On their How to remove yourself from Crunchbase page, Crunchbase exhorts you to instead update your information, saying “Before asking us to delete your Crunchbase personal profile, we ask that you consider editing the profile to correct any inaccuracies,” completely ignoring the fact that you never added or wanted your personal data to be in the Crunchbase database in the first place.
Having decided that no, no thank you, you don’t want to leave your personal data in a database to which you never consented to it being stored in the first place, you can fill out this form to request the removal of your data from Crunchbase.
Crunchbase also advises that “due to our crowdsourced nature, there’s a small chance that a profile that is removed may be re-added in the future by our active community of contributors, publicly available sources on the internet , or various data partners.”
How to Remove Your Personal Data from Spokeo
Spokeo requires you to find the link to where your data is listed, and then go to a page to submit that link. The instructions actually make it seem more complicated than it actually is (hrrrm, by design?), so don’t let them daunt you. You will find those instructions here, and then you paste that URL into their removal page, which is here.
How to Remove Your Personal Data from Zoominfo
Zoominfo doesn’t even give you an option to do anything in terms of removing your personal data before you give up your email address to them. They say “How our process works: 1. Verify your identity via email confirmation 2. Submit request to remove profile 3. Receive notification that your request is being processed”
You can start that process on the ZoomInfo removal page here.
How to Remove Your Personal Data from RocketReach
RocketReach claims that “Our service is not a data source for email spam or robocalls. Our customers include Amazon, Google, and Apple. If your profile is on RocketReach, your contact details have been accessed an average of 0.06 times per year.” We’re dubious, especially because a) their removal page is actually called their “claim your profile page”, and b) that page says “RocketReach promotes your business contact, which helps increase the reach of your network! RocketReach allows other business professionals to assess your talents and present you with opportunities!”
Whether they are just trying to dissuade you from removing your data from their clutches, or they are trying to make you think that you can’t even opt-out there, in fact it is the page at which you can remove your profile. The fact that you have to claim it first, when you didn’t even ask to have your personal data turned into a RocketReach profile in the first place, is…creepy. You can claim your profile and then have it removed from Rocket Reach here.
How to Have Someone Else Remove Your Personal Data from Over 500 Data Brokers and Databases
DeleteMe is a service that helps you reclaim your data privacy by removing you from any of the more than 500 (580 at last count) slimy, scummy places that are selling your data, or selling access to your data. What makes them different from other, similar services is that they do this with a combination of automation and actual human outreach and interaction. This is because while there are some places from which your personal information can be deleted through automation, there are others that require a human to get in touch with them. Plus they constantly monitor and update, so those sneaky data brokers can’t add you back in once they’ve removed you.
DeleteMe isn’t cheap, but they also aren’t really all that expensive, less than the cost of a standard Netflix subscription, although it’s annual not monthly. But we’ve actually arranged a 20% discount for our readers, which makes it substantially less than that Netflix subscription. You can learn more about the DeleteMe services and take advantage of that special discount here.
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