VAIBHAV DECODED

Using Claude to remove every online photo of you

Why Your Info Is Out There

You never posted your home address online. So why does typing your name into Google pull up your address, your age, your relatives, and a phone number you have had for years?

Data brokers. These are companies whose entire business is buying, scraping, and reselling personal information. They pull from public records, old accounts, store loyalty cards, and other data they buy, then package it into a profile and put it on a people-search site like Spokeo or Whitepages. Anyone can look you up for a few dollars. You never agreed to it, and most people have no idea it is even happening.

100s of sites may list you $0 to remove yourself

1 afternoon to clean up

The good news: almost all of it can be removed, and it is free to do yourself. It takes some patience, which is exactly where Claude comes in. It cannot log into these sites for you, but it can write every removal request, deletion demand, and takedown notice so you are not staring at a blank page. You paste, you send, you move on.

SET YOUR EXPECTATIONS HONESTLY You cannot erase yourself from the internet completely, and anyone promising that is selling something. What you CAN do is remove the large majority of your exposed personal info and make yourself much harder to find. That is a real, achievable win, and it is what this guide gets you.

Step 1: See What Is Exposed

You cannot clean up what you cannot see. Start by finding what is actually out there. Fifteen minutes here tells you exactly what to target.

STEP 1: Search yourself like a stranger would

Open a private browser window so your own history does not skew results. Search your name in quotes, then try it with your city, your old employer, and your phone number. Note every people-search site that shows up. Those are your hit list.

ASK CLAUDE TO MAP THE SEARCH
    I want to see what personal information about me
    is publicly searchable. Give me a checklist of
    the exact searches to run on myself (name
    variations, name plus city, phone, email) and
    the most common people-search sites I should
    look for in the results.

STEP 2: Check where your photos have been reposted

If you want to find where a specific photo of yours has ended up, use a reverse image search on that exact image. This matches the picture itself, so it finds copies and reposts of a photo you already have. Two free tools do this well:

Google Lens (images.google.com, click the camera) and TinEye (tineye.com). Upload the one photo you care about, and they show you other places that same image appears. Do this per photo, for the images you actually want to track.

STEP 3: Set up alerts so you catch new stuff

Go to google.com/alerts and create alerts for your name and your phone number. From now on, Google emails you when new results appear. It is the cheapest early-warning system there is.

TIP Keep a simple running list as you go: site name, what it exposed, and the link. You will hand pieces of this to Claude in the next steps, and it keeps you from doing the same site twice.