I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?
Honestly? It’s not something I would pay for. Google has their own service where they’ll let you know if they find your information and you can ask them to remove the search result.
Beyond that, there’s some information that you just fundamentally can’t make private and no service can get taken down.
Most data mining sites just collect those public records and put them next to each other, so they get a pile of your name, birthday, where you were born, how active you are as a voter and all that stuff.
Removing your address from Google maps just seems silly to me. That there is a residence there is fundamentally public information, not being on maps doesn’t make it less public it just probably causes issues for delivery drivers.
Anyone who has your data and is going to be a jerk about it isn’t going to listen to a request to take it down either. They’re just going to send you spam messages.
The odds of being Targeted by a determined individual who’s focused explicitly on you is low. They tend to target a broad swath of people, and then dig in on people who take the bait a few times.