Keeping Our Home Addresses Offline: How To Graduate From Opt-Out Whack-A-Mole

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Presented at ShmooCon 2025 by

Yael Grauer

After seven years of scrubbing my home address from every people search site I could find (and even creating a DIY opt-out list to help others do the same), I playfully asked a friend who wanted to mail me something to try to find my address himself. Not only was HIS friend able to locate my public data within 15 minutes, he could link that data to variations of that one password I used everywhere before I knew any better and a spicy email address I used for about ten seconds over a decade ago. I am not alone. There are many people who opt others out for a living, but still can’t keep their own data from cropping up repeatedly, not to mention what a dedicated adversary can find by simply perusing real estate records, voter records, or a free trial of a skip tracing service. When even foremost experts in this space can’t keep their data private, what recourse do the rest of us have? Opting ourselves out of every new people-search site that crops up can still leave us exposed, but with some smart policy changes, we can graduate from this perpetual game of whack-a-mole.