Is Free My ID safe?
A privacy tool you have to trust with your information isn't much of a privacy tool. Free My ID is built so you can check our work.
Your details stay on your computer. Nothing is sent to us.
Your details stay on your PC. The app talks only to the sites you are asking to remove you, your own email account, and our public list of those sites. Nothing is sent to us.
- Only on your computer. There's no account and no cloud. We have no servers holding your data.
- Locked. Your details are stored encrypted on your computer, and the key is kept in Windows' own secure password store. The printable progress report you can make is a normal file, so it holds only the name you gave this person, site names, statuses and dates, never your address or phone number.
- Fenced in. The app may only contact the removal sites themselves and your removal mailbox. Everything else is blocked. The only exception is a one-time, optional download of a small extra browser, and only if your computer has no Chrome or Edge, and it asks you first.
- Sites get as little as possible: only what they already show about you, plus a removal email address.
Keeping the list of sites up to date
People-search sites change their removal pages often. So Free My ID can download an updated list of sites and removal steps from the Free My ID project. That download sends nothing about you or the people you protect: it only fetches the list.
What it never asks for
- Your Social Security number
- Bank account, credit or debit card details
- A payment of any kind
- Your full birthday. The setup asks only for a year of birth, and you can leave that blank
- Your phone number, unless you choose to share it with a site that needs it
- A photo of your ID, unless you switch that on yourself in Settings for a site that insists on it
- The password to your everyday email
If you want Free My ID to send requests for you, you give it an app password for a separate removal mailbox. That's optional.
You can check the work
Free My ID is open source, so anyone can read exactly what it does. The code is public under the GNU AGPL license.
See the Free My ID code on GitHub
Check that your download is genuine
Only download Free My ID from our download page or from our GitHub releases page. We will never email you an installer, and we will never call you.
Every release comes with a fingerprint (a long code) you can compare with the file you downloaded. How to check the download's fingerprint
Stop or uninstall any time
Open Windows Settings → Apps, find Free My ID, and click Uninstall. That also removes the daily check. It asks whether to delete your saved records too.
What it will not do
Free My ID does not stop phone listening, wiretaps or government surveillance. It removes listings from people-search sites.
This website
No cookies, no trackers, no analytics, no outside fonts or scripts. Every picture, icon and style on this site comes from this site itself, so visiting it doesn't tell any other company that you were here.
That's also why you didn't see a cookie banner: there are no cookies to ask about. The site has no forms, so it can't collect anything you type.
Links to other websites (such as a people-search site's removal page, or our code on GitHub) are ordinary links. Once you click one, that website's own privacy rules apply.