How to Opt Out of PeekYou in 2025

Did you know someone can figure out a whole lot about your identity with just one of your online usernames? You might think your username isn’t connected to your identity at all. But, the reality is, if you’ve ever posted personally identifying information on any account using that username, people search sites like PeekYou can find it. And then, they connect that information with all of the other information about you they can find on the web.

We don’t tell you this to scare you. Although, when we realized this, it did send a shiver down our spin. We’re telling you this so you can take action and get your data removed from sites like these.

While we’re going to go through the manual process of opting out of PeekYou here, we recommend investing in one of the best data removal services. A data removal service automatically scrubs your data from multiple data brokers and people search sites like PeekYou. After testing Incogni, it’s the service we’d recommend for most people due to its easy set up and fast results. But if that’s not in your budget right now, start taking control of your online privacy by manually opting out of PeekYou.

What Is PeekYou?

Focused on data available on the internet, PeekYou aggregates all of the details posted about you on social media sites, news sites, and other websites. Then, they provide a tool for searching based on your name or username on various sites. This lets someone gather all of your publicly available data through a quick search.

Although they advertise themselves as a tool for connecting with old acquaintances, people search sites like PeekYou are all too often used for nefarious purposes. As a site that lets its users search for people based on usernames, one of the most common malicious uses for it is doxxing. That’s when someone connects your online username with your real personal data and then shares that information publicly. People do this to get people fired from jobs due to the things they post online, target in-person harassment, or worse.

>> Read About: What Is Doxxing? And How Can You Keep Your Child Safe?

How We Opted Out of PeekYou

We have to give credit where credit is due. PeekYou’s opt out process was a lot easier than most people search sites. For instance, when we opted out of Spokeo, we needed to find the profile we needed removed on their site first. And that wasn’t an easy process. We didn’t get results when we searched the profile. That would make most people think Spokeo doesn’t have any of their information. But we knew better, so we searched up the person’s email instead. Lo and behold, all of their personal information popped right up.

PeekYou didn’t make us go through this song and dance. Instead, we put in our details to their opt out form, submitted and confirmed it, and they removed our data from their site.

>> Read More: How to Opt Out of LexisNexis

How to Remove Your Data Manually From PeekYou

Now let’s go through the process we followed to opt out of PeekYou for free:

1. First, you need to head over to PeekYou’s website. From the top of the page, you can search your name to see what information they have on you. Take note of the last address they have. That’s one of the way’s you’re going to tell PeekYou who you are when trying to opt out.

2. With the town and state PeekYou connects with your profile in hand, you can head down to the very bottom of their site. In the footer, you’ll see a link called “Do Not Sell My Personal Information.” It’s a dark gray on a light gray background so it’s easy to miss. We took a screenshot and circled the link so you know exactly where to look.

3. Once you open up the “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link, you get directed to a basic form. Fill out that form with as much information as you can. It might seem counterintuitive to give PeekYou more information about yourself, but that’s the information they remove from their site. Make sure you put in the city and state you wrote down in step number one. Then, complete the Captcha, check off all four boxes, and hit submit.

4. After submitting the opt out request, PeekYou sends a verification email to the email you provided in the opt out form. This is an important step as you need to confirm you made the opt out request. In the email they send, there will be a link you need to click to complete your opt out.

5. Clicking the link in the verification email completes the opt out process. If done successfully, you should see a page that says your request has been verified.

That’s all there is to it. Opting out of PeekYou took us about 15 minutes and if you follow our step-by-step guide, you can do it even quicker. When you’re done opting out of PeekYou, we recommend following our list of five easy opt outs to protect your identity next.

>> Learn About: How to Opt Out of TruthFinder

Use Data Removal Sites and Services to Opt Out of PeekYou

While opting out of PeekYou was a relatively painless process, there are hundreds of sites just like it. To keep our information safe online, we would need to opt out of every single one of them. Let’s say there are two hundred sites like this (there are a lot more than that) and each one took 15 minutes to opt out of. That would be a total of 50 hours to opt out of them all.

If you’re like us and don’t have a spare 50 hours to spend opting out of people search sites and data brokers, we recommend investing in a data removal service. They do the opt out process for you, either manually or automatically. For instance, when we tested Optery, they automatically opted us out of up to 300 sites, but they also let us request a manual opt out from any sites they missed. Although that process took some time, we appreciate the thoroughness.

When we tested Kanary, on the other hand, they only used an automatic opt-out process, but they checked for our information against a massive database of sites. Their database includes over 1,000 sites like PeekYou.

>> Learn More: Kanary vs Incogni: Comparing Two Data Removal Services

Use Incogni to Opt Out of PeekYou

All that said, we still preferred using Incogni. They didn’t have the biggest database of people search sites or manual opt out requests. But, they gave us the quickest results. We didn’t want to wait around for months until our data was removed from sites like PeekYou. And that’s what we had to do when using Optery and Kanary.

Incogni stood out because it requested the removal of our data from 129 sites in the first week. Plus, Incogni is made by one of our favorite VPN services. That means while we were testing Surfshark, we could upgrade our service to include Incogni in it as well. And that upgrade only cost us less than two dollars per month.

Recap: How to Opt Out of PeekYou

Opting out of PeekYou was a fairly straightforward process compared to most data brokers and people search sites. It only took us about 15 minutes, and we think you could do it even faster since you have our step-by-step guide. Removing our information from PeekYou helped us separate our real name from our online accounts.

But, PeekYou is one of hundreds of people search sites and data brokers that expose our personal information. That’s why even though it was easy to opt out of PeekYou, we still recommend a data removal service. Our favorite is Incogni because it gave us fast results securing our information today instead of months later.