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.

To: “Classmates” <membercare@mc.classmates.com>
Subject: Re: Forgot Email or Registration

Please remove *******@*****.com from your email database immediately. I will not be making an account to remove it, and I doubt the legality in which you came to have that email address in your system. You have 3 (three) business days to respond or I will be filing a grievance with the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for deceptive business practices.
Regards

There is some validity to my email and in a coming post, I will explain more about digital rights. The Can SPAM act was a pretty nice piece of legislation.

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).

I jumped back to google and went to this other site I remember reading an article about; they make you fax your state ID with your ID# blacked out. Intelius is a pretty scary site. Needless to say, we’ll be faxing them on Monday morning and waiting “4 to 6 weeks” for them to securely delete the record from their database.

An interesting side story:
A few years ago when I was fooling around at work with my drum scanner, I found a setting that would actually remove a few layers of the sharpy, making the text below somewhat legible. I scanned my ID as a test and printed it out, then sharpied over the and then rescanned it. I was on the phone with the scanner tech support trying to a make ID’s more legible/identifiable and while I was on hold, I was playing around with some settings. I found a combination that took off the sharpy, tech support came on and of course we were sharing screens-they knew my weight and blah, oh well, I had basically found my own solution. Hopefully it worked because I had physical access to the first copy that had the sharpy on it and that once another copy is made, the sharpy is the same wavelength as the reprinted text (my guess as to why it was revealed).

Two other sites that aggregate information are Public Records Now and PeopleFinders. They require you to send them a letter (snail mail style) with a copy of your page on their site and all of your personal information, sans social security number, so that they can find you in their system and delete you.

The other sites that I found merely pulled from Intelius, PublicRecordsNow or PeopleFinders. I believe once your record is zapped from those three sites, you will no longer be found on the other sites. I will be doing more research to verify this, but it makes sense (they were sponsored links meaning they were passing the searched info to site A and it was returning your info).

Hope you enjoyed my expedition into protecting your online privacy.