This email will probably only work against legit only stores but may work with others. I wouldn’t try this on a spammer because that really wouldn’t work. There are to many large words for the Nigerian spam lords to interpret and sending an email to a spammer would only confirm that your email is valid. That would only exacerbate your problem and take you further away from online anonymity.

Below is the email I sent to classmates.com. They have/had my email address and I never signed up, nor will I ever sign up, for their service. Something seems a bit fishy about their business practices and having to opt in (create an account) only to opt out again, does not seem conducive to my online rights. Hence my boycott. It took some digging, but I found a working email address that wouldn’t send me back the standard “screw off, we don’t monitor this account” email.

A few days ago, I received a text from my mom. She had found a reference to her name online and was curious as to how to remove it because she didn’t want to suffer another go around with identity theft. I told her I would look into it and today I did just that. As she had found herself on google, I decided that was a good place to start (i’ll get to the other places that I have come across).

There are a ton of sites that aggregate personal information and then display it in a decent looking format. From google, I saw the link she was curious about and began there. It was a White Pages page containing everything about her, except for her social. Fortunately Whitepages made it easy to remove it by just clicking a remove button (which was hidden amongst offers to join their site). While on the white pages page, I noticed a link to MyLife. I decided to investigate that and boy, do they not make it easy to remove your information. I ended up sending a nice email to their privacy box (bet it goes straight to null, aka nowhere).