Its one thing to be vaguely aware that privacy no longer really exists. We live in a world filled with doorbell cameras, so your chances of turning up in random TikToks or YouTube videos are never zero, after all. But most people assume that theres a clear line between what we consider our personal business and the information available in public records. But the truth is that line isnt much of a line at allyou dont have to be a billionaire with a private jet to experience the joys of public records.

　　If youve ever Googled an old school friend out of curiosity youve probably gotten a bunch of results back from sites like Spokeo or Whitepages promising to generate a report that lists everything about that person. Maybe you thought it was a scam, but those sites can actually offer you a ton of information about just about anyone, because theres a lot more information about you in publicand publicly accessiblerecords than you might think.

　　The truth is out thereSo whats in public records? A lot. The basicsyour name, birthday, home addresscertainly. But also most probably stuff like

　　your drivers license number and status

　　your Social Security number

　　traffic fines and accidents

　　your voter registration

　　your marital status

　　your home address

　　employment history

　　your photo and physical description

　　the names of your immediate relatives, spouse, and children

　　property records including liens, foreclosures, and mortgages

　　arrest records

　　Some of this is obvious. If youve ever maintained a LinkedIn profile, your work history, photo, and contact info was likely scraped and repackaged. If you list your home for sale, everyone in your neighborhood can know about it immediately when your house shows up on Trulia or Zillow.

　　But you might imagine that things you dont voluntarily post online would remain private. For example, if you get into financial trouble and your home is foreclosed on, youre probably not posting that to Facebook with a frowny face emoji, so you might expect it to remain private. But youd be wrong. If someone wants to know if youre in foreclosure on your home, its very easy to find all that information, too. By triangulating mortgage, foreclosure, and court records you can assemble a pretty clear picture of someones financial state without violating a single law.

　　One reason this is so easy? The government is actively selling your information via that beloved institution: The DMV. In order to obtain a drivers license, you have to submit a lot of personal information to your states Department of Motor Vehicles or equivalent, and they actively and enthusiastically sell that information to third parties. That alone makes it insanely easy to find out most of this stuff. And anything classified as a public record is legally accessible by anyoneotherwise it wouldnt be considered public.

　　Reclaiming privacySo details about your life are in public records. What can you do about it?

　　Not a ton. Agencies like the DMV arent going to scrub your personal data because they need that to perform their function, and theyre not going to stop selling your data until the laws change. And once information from social media is scraped, there is no way to unscrape it. But there are a few things you can do to remove private information from at least some public records:

　　People-search sites. You probably know about sites like Spokeo, Intelius, or WhitePages where you can search public records for people. These sites often have a surprising amount of information available about you. They also all offer tools to have your information removed from their database, so you can often search for opt-out pages and privacy tools pages on those sites to scrub some of your information from the Internet.

　　Remove unused profiles. If you have old social media profiles or online memberships that you no longer use, remove them. Most platforms offer some form of account removal, and getting this data off the public-facing Internet is a small step towards controlling the publicly available information about you. While youre at it, switch social media accounts to private if you can.

　　You should also reach out to the Internet Archive. This invaluable service preserves web pages for posterity, but old social media profiles, personal websites, and other artifacts of your prior online lives are often preserved as well. You can request their removal pretty easily, but the Archive warns it makes no guarantee it will comply.

　　Contact government agencies, banks, and other entities. It can be extremely difficult to remove public information from government sites, but there are some actions you can pursue. Many states will obscure or block your voter registration information if you fit certain criteria, for example. If you resolve a foreclosure, you can (and should!) ask your lender to remove the Notice of Default, though this may not propagate to real estate sites in a timely manner (or at all). You can also try to get real estate listings of your home taken down, and you can ask Google to blur your house, though sites like Zillow probably wont be willing to remove your home from their database. Depending on where you live, you may be able to request that identifiable information like phone numbers and Social Security numbers be removed from public records. You can visit your local County Clerk and ask to see the public records you appear in, and request their removal. Your mileage will vary.

　　Thats about all you can do. Public records are persistent and play a vital role in local governance, so you wont be able to remove everythingand the stuff you might be able to remove will require a lot of work.

　　And then constant vigilance, because the chances that your information just pops up again some time later are pretty good. To combat that, you can consider paying for a service like DeleteMe or PrivacyBee, which will monitor people search sites and other online repositories for your personal information and automatically request its removal. These services cost money (ranging from $8 to $20 per month), but knowing someone is opting you out of online databases on your behalf can help you sleep at night.

　　Just being aware of whats out there is useful, though. At least youll know just how little privacy you actually have, and what people can find out about you with minimal effort.