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How to protect your family's privacy online

ยท 4 min read

When one person in a household is easy to find online, everyone in it usually is. People-search listings often show relatives and people who have lived at the same address, so your listing can lead to your parents, your partner or your adult children, and theirs can lead back to you. Protecting your family's privacy works best as a shared project. Here is a practical checklist, organized by who you are protecting.

Start with a family privacy check

Set aside an hour and look at what is out there:

  1. Search each adult's name with your city and state. Note any people-search listings that show a current address, phone number or the names of relatives.
  2. Search your home address and main phone numbers. Reverse lookups often show who lives where.
  3. Review public social media profiles. Look for addresses, school names, birthdays, travel plans and photos that show your house number or car plate.

Write down what you find. It gives you a to-do list and a baseline to check against later.

For every adult in the household

  • Remove people-search listings. Each site has its own opt-out process, and listings can come back when brokers refresh their data. Our guide to removing yourself from data brokers walks through the steps.
  • Each adult should decide for themselves. An opt-out or deletion request is made in that person's name, and many sites ask the person to confirm it from their own email. Talk it through together rather than acting for someone without asking.
  • Register phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry at DoNotCall.gov. It's free and covers mobile numbers too.
  • Turn on two-factor authentication for email, banking and social media accounts, and use a password manager so no two accounts share a password.
  • Opt out of prescreened credit offers at OptOutPrescreen.com, which cuts down on mail that contains personal details.

For children and teens

Children are rarely listed on people-search sites, but they leave other trails:

  • Freeze your child's credit. A federal law that took effect in 2018 lets parents request a free credit freeze for children under 16 at each of the three nationwide credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. A freeze makes it harder for someone to open accounts in your child's name.
  • Set social media accounts to private and turn off location sharing in posts and photos. Talk about why school names, team schedules and home addresses shouldn't be posted.
  • Think before you share. Photos of a first day of school in front of the house, or a jersey with a name and number, can reveal more than you intend.
  • Watch school and activity directories. Ask whether directory information can be withheld if you would rather it not be shared.

When your teen turns 18, their own records start to appear in public and commercial databases. That is a good time to run a privacy check together.

For aging parents

Older adults are frequent targets of phone and mail scams, and their long address histories make them easy to find.

  • Remove their people-search listings, which often show their age and relatives, a combination scammers use for "grandparent" and family emergency scams.
  • Agree on a family code word. If someone calls claiming a family member is in trouble and needs money, ask for the code word or hang up and call that person directly. Voice cloning tools make these calls more convincing than they used to be.
  • Talk through the common scams: callers claiming to be from Medicare, Social Security, the IRS or a bank, prize notifications that ask for a fee, and anyone who asks to be paid with gift cards or a wire transfer.
  • Help them look up suspicious numbers before calling back, and set up call filtering on their phone. See how to look up a spam number.
  • Consider a credit freeze for them as well. It's free for adults too.

Protect the home address

A home address is the single most sensitive detail in most listings. Beyond removing listings:

  • Use a PO box or other mailing address for subscriptions, online orders and public filings where that is allowed.
  • Be careful with package photos, house tours and real estate posts that show your address.
  • If someone in your household is at risk of stalking or domestic violence, ask your state about its address confidentiality program, if it has one. Many states offer a substitute address for public records.

Make it a habit

Family privacy isn't a one-time cleanup. New listings appear, removed ones come back, and teens become adults with records of their own. Put a reminder on the calendar to repeat the family privacy check, and update your list each time.

How ShieldApps Privacy helps

The ShieldApps Privacy Family plan gives one account 5 profiles: you plus 4 people. You invite them from the Family page. Each adult signs in once to add their details and sign their own authorization, and can let you manage their profile; once they do, you see their progress from your account. For every profile, we search the sites on our list that allow automated searches, send the removal requests you choose where we support the site's opt-out form, give step-by-step instructions for the rest, and actively monitor for new and returning listings. Each adult gets their own email updates. See plans and pricing.