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Most of these sites are powered by large, shadowy data brokers without publicly accessible search features, which track the personal data of millions of people.

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But there are dozens of general people-search sites out there, like and Spokeo, that serve up personal information to anyone with some free time and a few bucks to spend. It bills itself as a genealogy research site-a free, less powerful version of the dominant service-that allows people to search for their family members and assemble detailed family trees. MyFamilyTree is just one site in an extensive web of online services that compile, store, and sell (or give away) personal data. Trying to scrub your identity from the internet is like trying to drain a bucket of water with an eyedropper, while a dripping faucet slowly fills it back up again. (I reached out to FamilyTreeNow through its website, and to its founder, Dustin Weirich, whose contact information I found on -Weirich appears to have removed his information from FamilyTreeNow since Brittain’s tweets went viral-but I didn’t receive a response.)īut even those who were able to opt out of FamilyTreeNow were only barely less visible online than they were before.

#Family tree now manual

The site’s profile-removal tool soon buckled under the weight of the traffic, leaving people to send manual removal requests through the website’s contact form. Replies ranged from disbelief to anger, as other users urged their friends and family to opt out, too. She followed a labyrinthine set of steps to remove her and her husband’s profiles from the website, and tweeted out instructions for others to do the same.īy the next morning, the first tweet in her thread had been retweeted more than 3,000 times. Her sister’s profession puts her at risk of retaliation, and Brittain didn’t want her young kids to be put in harm’s way, too. Something unusual popped up: Her niece, Brittain’s kids, were listed as her “associates.”īrittain was rattled.

As a part of a routine search for her own internet footprint-Brittain’s sister works at a child-advocacy center-she had entered her own name into the genealogy site FamilyTreeNow she’d just read about on Facebook. Last week, Anna Brittain, a young-adult author based in Birmingham, Alabama, got a surprising text from her sister.