Welcome to Optery. Here’s a simple guide to help you get started.

1. Start by Reviewing Your Dashboard

Once you sign up, Optery automatically scans for your information and shows results in your Dashboard. Start by clicking the “View” links under the “Link to Profile” column.

Optery helps you quickly see where your personal information is showing up across people search sites (data brokers).

Instead of searching each site one by one, Optery brings everything together in one place. We cover hundreds of data broker sites, and based on the details you provide when signing up (such as your name and location), we generate direct links to profiles that may be connected to you.

You can view the latest list of supported sites here: Data Broker Directory

This gives you a clear and centralized view of your exposure so you can easily review and decide what to do next.

In most cases, the screenshots and “View” links give you a quick and helpful preview of where your personal information may appear online. You may sometimes see similar names or broader results, especially if you have a common name like “John Smith” or “Mary Smith.” In some cases, your profile may not show up immediately.

2. Decide If You Want to Take Action and Start Removing Your Profiles

After clicking 10 - 20 of these links, you should start to get a sense of where your information is exposed, and its time to decide if you'd like to take action to have your profiles removed. Turning a blind eye to these types of companies (i.e. people search data brokers) that broadcast your information to the world for anyone to find can really come back to bite you.

These sites are used to find long lost friends, but they’re also used by identity thieves, hackers, spammers, phishers, doxers, swatters, stalkers, criminals, investigators, and lawyers to act against you. In a world where personal information has increasingly become weaponized, there's a growing movement of people that are taking action to remove their profiles from these types of sites.

Option 1 - Start Removing Your Profiles On Your Own (Self Service)

If you’d like to remove profiles on your own, you can do this directly from your Dashboard. Click the “Show More” toggle in the “More Info” column for each data broker, then go to their self-service opt-out page. From there, you can fill out the form and submit your removal request.

In many cases, you can also contact these companies by email to request removal. We’ve gathered opt-out links and contact details to make this process easier for you.

Option 2 - Upgrade to a Paid Plan and We'll Submit Removals For You

If you don’t have the time to submit and manage the removals yourself, you can upgrade to a paid plan and we’ll submit the removals for you. These data broker companies are often difficult to deal with and there are so many of them that many people find it’s a better use of their time to pay us to remove their profiles for them. If you sign up for a paid plan,

• We submit removal requests on your behalf right after you subscribe
• We manage follow-ups with data broker sites
• You can track progress directly in your Dashboard

3. Add More Details to Your Profile

When you sign up for Optery, we require the bare minimum information necessary to find your profiles online (i.e. first name, last name, city, state, and birth year). If you don't provide that basic information, it's difficult for us to find your profile among the millions of others out there for visibility in the Dashboard and for removals.

After signing up, we recommend navigating to the Manage Profile page and updating your profile. The more info you provide, the better we'll be able to find your profiles. For free plan users, this means the View links will be of better quality, and you can view more of them. For paid plan users, providing more information makes it easier for us to locate all profiles and remove them on an ongoing basis.

Updated on: 03/04/2026