Tips for Hiding Your Home Address From Online Searches

There are different ways you can protect your home address (image licensed by Colleen Collins)

Updated 1-14-2012

The Internet offers a wealth of information to anyone–just make sure your personal information, such as your home address, isn’t part of it.  By being security-minded, you can prevent your home address from finding its way into public databases and other places where it can be easily retrieved through an online search.  Here’s a few tips:

Don’t give out your home address.  Make it a habit to not give this out, except to known friends and family members. Don’t write it down in forms, enter it in any online documents or registration/subscription services, and so on.  If you must provide an address, give your work address. Better yet, get a personal mailbox address, such as from MAIL BOXES ETC., and use that instead.

Note: A plus to using a personal mailbox service (versus a mail box from USPS) is that most personal mail box services offer real street addresses (which various registration and service forms require) and personal mailbox stores accept courier mail deliveries.

Remove your address from your website, social networking sites, craigslist ads, and so forth.

• For free, you can do a cursory check of other online sites where your home address displays online by entering your address in your Internet browser.  In the results, if you see your address displayed on a website, blog, other online site, contact the site owner/website administrator, and request them to remove your address.
• For a fee, you can subscribe to a service such as Reputation where you can do such tasks (depending on the product you choose) such as fix your Google results, remove online personal data and stop sites from tracking you.

Have a great week, Writing PIs