Here are a few important steps to delete your personal information off of the internet.
Hey there, I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I’m a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and a three time best selling co-author. In each episode, you’ll get real world, practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you’re in the right place.
So it’s been a pretty crazy week for me this past week. I am excited to be starting a new week. I am really excited to re-record my new webinar and get that up and running. I am so thrilled and honored that I was able to do the Small Business Digital Ready webinar with Verizon Wireless, just the other day. If you haven’t checked that out, as long as you are part of my email list, I will make sure that you get access to the recording. And if you are signed up for Verizon Small Business Digital Ready, you should get access to the recordings. If you’re not, a link to the website is gonna be in the show notes below.
Also, if you haven’t yet seen my new webinar on how I get over 600 leads every single month without posting every single day on social, without cold DMing people. And in a way that attracts customers to want to work with me rather than me trying to seek them out. If you’re interested in hearing more head on over to jilliankendrick.com/masterclass and you’ll get access to my completely free training. I’ve updated a few things. There’s some really, really good content in there. I can’t wait to see you.
Today I want to talk to you about something really, really important. So as you’re growing your business or as you’re starting your business or as you’re scaling your business or as you’re ramping up your business or maybe you’re changing from a business brand to a personal brand or vice versa. Whatever stage of business or life that you’re in right now, I think this information is 100% applicable. So if you go to Google, as we all do, and you Google your name or you Google your name, address, right? Like literally type in your actual name and then the word address or ‘s address. It’s really creepy that your personal information is out there on the web for anybody to find if they can Google the right words or know your name and where you live. Even relatively. So as you become a personal brand or as your business grows or as these things evolve for you, as a business owner, I think it becomes more and more important for you to protect yourself, protect your family and protect your data. So if you haven’t already, please, please, please. I’m begging you to make sure that your business is registered to and associated with an address that is not your home. Even if you’re like me and you have a home office, you do business at home. That’s great. And there’s no problem with that. At least in the state of Florida where I live, it’s to my knowledge, perfectly acceptable to have a physical address where my business mail goes, but then operate my business out of my home. And so check with your state and your local government to make sure that that’s possible for you as well. But it’s so easy for you to go get a UPS box or a post office box or some kind of a virtual office box or address that you can associate to your business and not use your home address. It’s just going to protect you. So even if I Google, my name and I Google, Florida or the town that I live in. The very first result is Sunbiz and Sunbiz is like the entity and division of corporations website for Florida. And my name pops up as well as my address, but it’s my business address and not my home address. The exact same thing with my husband. Like he has a professional license, that license is through the state of Florida. Anybody who knows what that is and knows his name or knows the industry that he’s in can go and Google that. But now his license is associated to my business address as well. So it’s protecting us, it’s protecting our home. It’s protecting our family and our children that our personal home address is not listed anywhere on the internet that anybody could go and find.
As I’m going through this for myself I wanted to give you a couple of tips to help you remove some of this information from the internet so that people can’t then go and find you. Look, I’m small peanuts. Right. I have a very successful thriving business. I do really well for myself, but I’m not, I’m not a name, right? Like people know who Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are or who Mark Zuckerberg is or half a dozen other people, people know who Anna Wintour is. People know who Taylor Swift is. I am not a name nor do I desire to be a name of that level. However, just because I’m small peanuts doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be taking the necessary steps, and you should too, to protect myself and my family as much as I possibly can. So there’s a couple of things that you can do.
Number one when you Google your name with the word address or some kind of other identifier. When you see the list of the results that come up on Google next to the URL should be three little dots. And if you find a result that actually when I looked mine up, I found a result that I did not like. When you find a result that you don’t like or you believe should not be searchable on the internet, you can hit the three little dots and you can choose an option called remove result. Now you have to be, I believe you have to be logged into Google and have a Google account in order to do this, but you can click remove results and it will ask you why do you want to remove these results? And I will say it shows my personal contact information. I’d rather keep that private. So you select that, give it the details of what it shows, hit continue and then send the request. If the request is approved, we’ll remove the results with your contact information from our Google search. And it says Google’s mission is to make useful information accessible to everyone. For every removal request, we check to make sure that the contact information is personal and not professional. That’s true n this case. The web page doesn’t belong to an educational or government institution, I believe that’s true in this case. And you don’t control the content. So it couldn’t be me putting my own home address on my website and then saying, oh, you gotta take that down, which is ridiculous anyway, but I agree with their criteria. So go through those processes and you can get Google to potentially remove that information from search, which is really, really cool.
But I would take it a step further. I would look at websites like ownerly.com,voterrecords.com whitepages.com, peoplefinders.com, instantcheckmate.com, all of this can have very serious personal, potentially damaging information on these websites that you need to be aware of exists on the internet and to protect yourself and your family just even as a citizen, not just as a business owner, but to protect yourself. You should go through the process of looking yourself up on websites like this and seeing if there is a process to request or delete that information from their website.
On voterrecords.com for instance, when you go to the FAQs, it actually lists how you can remove your information from voterrecords.com. And it walks you through a four step process to receive a verification email and opt out your record so that you can remove it and have your address removed from their website. If you go to whitepages.com and you go to their FAQs, there is an FAQ to edit or remove your personal listing and they have an opt out service whitepages.com/suppression-requests. You can go there and ask to have your information removed. If you happen to have a listing on peoplefinders.com. You can go to peoplefinders.com/contact and the help center. You can choose a topic on how to remove information from their website and contact customer care to do so. If you find a listing on Radaris.com, you can go to radaris.com/page/how-to-remove and you can request to have your information removed there.
And really for most of these, I just scrolled through and either went to their privacy policy and searched for the word remove or I just googled the name of the site and then opt out or remove or how to remove. But I cant stress this enough. It is so important for you to protect yourself and your family and no one else is going to do that job, but you. So take the necessary steps, protect your family and your personal data from the information being out there and visible to the world and I’ll see you on the next episode.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life or given you insight on how you can build your own momentum, then please share this with a friend. And if you’re ready to grow your business on autopilot, then I want to help you get there easier and faster with a free copy of my entrepreneur’s survival kit. Just leave a review of this podcast wherever you’re listening right now. Hopefully, it’s a five star review and you love it, then screenshot the review and email the screenshot to hello@jilliankendrick.com. Once we confirm the review, we’ll send you a copy of the survival kit totally free. Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you on the next episode. All content is written and recorded by Jillian Kendrick Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: #55
Topic: How to Protect Your Personal Data
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
https://jilliankendrick.com/link-pineapple/
http://peoplefinders.com/opt-out
