Defend Yourself Against the Deadly Threat of Weaponized People Search Sites

In Minnesota, a terrorist weaponized personal information from data brokers to carry out a political assassination. Here's how you can remove your data from such sites.

Reporting this week revealed that Minnesota terrorist Vance Boetler, who assassinated Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and attempted to assassinate Senator John Hoffman and his wife early Saturday morning, may have used information collected from people search websites to find the home addresses of his victims. This incident brings into sharp relief the potential threat posed to the resistance from the weaponization of such sites. Here’s how you can minimize the amount of information about yourself on these sites.

What are people search sites and what information do they provide?

You have most likely come across people search websites in your online journey. When you search for someone’s name in Google, often the first results are from websites like Whitepages.com, Intelius.com, Peoplefinder.com, or another of over 200 similar websites. These sites aggregate and provide personal information about individuals, such as name, address, phone number, relatives, email address, social media accounts, arrest records, and much more. While they often bill themselves as the digital equivalent of the phone book, they provide much more personal information on each of us than the traditional phone book ever did.

How bad actors exploit people search sites

Bad actors, from criminals to political partisans, exploit the personal information provided on people search sites in various ways. Perhaps the most well known example is “doxxing,” which includes gathering and posting someone’s personal information in an attempt to intimidate or frighten them into silence. This is a common tactic in online political disputes. The posted information can also then be used to carry out campaigns of targeted harassment against the individual both online and in the real world.

But the potential threats go far beyond doxxing, as the incident in Minnesota demonstrated. Information gathered from people search sites can be used by criminals for identity theft or by political opponents for impersonation campaigns meant to damage an opponent’s reputation. Hackers, both criminal and ideological, use such information gleaned from such sites to power social engineering campaigns meant to help them gain unauthorized access to email or social media accounts of their targets.

It’s not just the immediate target of the information collection from people search sites that can be harmed, however. Because such sites often provide information about a target’s family members, those individuals can be targeted and threatened as well. Such targeting can be deadly, as in the case of SWATing, where an attacker phones in false reports to the police in an effort to have the SWAT team sent to the target’s home. Several of these incidents have turned deadly. Of course, in Minnesota, spouses of the assassin’s primary targets were injured or killed.

Defending yourself from the dangers of people search sites - denial & deception

Defending yourself against the potential dangers posed by bad actors weaponizing your personal information gleaned from people search websites comes down to engaging in deliberate denial and deception. Deny your personal information, as much as possible, to would-be bad guys. Deceive by providing false, misleading, or inconsistent information.

Loose lips sink ships! Limit what you post about yourself online

First is denial. This starts with being extremely cautious about the information you share about yourself, your family, and your friends. Though attention has focused on the dangers of people search sites (and rightly so), it’s important to remember that the Minnesota terrorist could have obtained home address information from the victims themselves, who had posted that information online. Wired reported that “Representative Hortman's campaign website listed her home address, while Senator Hoffman’s appeared on his legislative webpage.” You should not post such information online, especially if you are a public figure.

So, if you have posted personal information about your home address, phone number, email, family members, or any other information over which you have control, go and remove that information first. Be aware that photos of your home or place of work, even if you did not post the exact address or location, could be “geolocated” by a bad actor determined to find out where you are. Such photos are also good candidates for your removal. In the future, be mindful of posting such information. When in doubt, don’t share, especially if you are active in the resistance and are worried about being targeted.

Remove personal information from people search sites

Next in denial is to remove your information from as many people search sites as possible. Most all of these sites offer an option to opt out of having your information displayed and/or stored by the site. You can opt out in two ways. First is the DIY approach, which involves submitting opt-out requests yourself. The two best resources for doing so are the Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List and Michael Bazzell’s Data Removal Guide. These are regularly updated lists of data broker sites with instructions for how to submit your opt-put request for each.

Be aware that there are at least 200 such sites, so submitting and verifying data removal for all of them can take some time. Also, this is not a one-time thing. Some data will start to repopulate on some of these sites after about three months. You will need to monitor them regularly and re-submit opt-outs as your information turns back up again. One strategy to start is to search yourself on Google and focus your attention on submitting opt-outs first for those sites that show up in the first 10 pages of the search results. This is the low hanging fruit, the sites that a bad actor is most likely to find first when they begin to search for you. Do the opt-outs for those sites first and then move on to the rest of the more obscure people search sites.

The second option for removing your information from people search websites is to hire a dedicated service for doing just that. There are many such services available with advantages and disadvantages to each and a wide range of price points and coverage. We are not going to recommend any particular service. We will say, however, that we have personally used DeleteMe and Optery in addition to submitting a first round of removals manually for those sites that turned up with our personal information in the first 10 pages of a Google search. As a result, our personal information is virtually nonexistent on people search sites. We say virtually, however, because the process of keeping the information gone is a never-ending process and information pops back up regularly.

Muddy the waters with false, misleading, or inconsistent information

The next step is to muddy the waters with deliberate deception. This involves putting out false, misleading, or inconsistent information about yourself that will then end up being displayed on the people search websites. There is no shortage of tactics for doing this. We will highlight just a few here.

In general, our advice is to “VPN your life.” Just as you can use a virtual private network (VPN) to shield your true IP address from thebsites you visit online, you can use a combination of

• burner phone numbers (e.g. Sudo)

• forwarding email addresses (e.g. 33mail)

• PO boxes or private mail receiving addresses (e.g. UPS Store)

• virtual payment cards (e.g. Privacy.com), and

• alias names.

Yes, we use all of the tools and services listed above and some others too.

Other options include signing up for magazine subscriptions (a $5 Wired subscription on sale is a favorite option) in an alias name to your real address or in your real name but to someone else’s address. (Get their permission first.) You can sign up to receive information about home security systems, cruises, or any number of other products using alias names and your real address or fake addresses. (Don’t sign up to receive what is essentially junk mail at some else’s real address, however, unless they give you permission to do so.) Get creative. The possibilities are endless.

Use of any, all, or a combination of these tools and tactics helps to shield your true information. But it also helps to confuse would-be attackers when the information you provide to online or offline retailers or service providers inevitably ends up on people search websites after it has been sold and shared.

An important caveat: We are not encouraging you to engage in fraudulent behavior! The phones, payment cards, email addresses, etc. that you provide should all be real. You’re not trying to get products and services for free. You are merely shielding your primary email address, for example, by using a forwarding address that forwards to your primary address. With virtual payment cards, the vendor will still get paid by your bank or credit card.

Finally, do not provide false information to government agencies. This means when filing your taxes, setting up government-run utility accounts, getting a driver’s license, registering to vote, etc. Unfortunately, that information can, in some states, also end up feeding people search websites. However, the risks of providing false information in these cases will far outweigh those faced by the average person seeking to protect their personal information online.

Long-term solutions

We know what you’re likely thinking. “It shouldn’t be this way! Why should I have to go through all of this?” And you would be right! Ideally, an agency like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, would regulate the personal data broker industry and prevent them from selling our information. In fact, the Bureau proposed just such a rule in December 2024. But, alas, the Trump regime has since rescinded that proposed rule.

Until we have such regulations or, better yet, comprehensive legislation, we are on our own. We are not helpless, however. With the tools and tactics above, you can remove most, if not all, of your personal information from people search sites, making it more difficult for bad actors to target you. Given our increasingly dangerous political climate, it is worth the time, effort, and money to do so if you are engaged in resistance activities of any kind.

GenAI Use Disclosure: Generative AI was not used for any part of the research or writing of this piece.