10 Free Tools to See How Much of Your Data Is Online (2026 Edition)
Ten free tools that show you what's exposed about you online — breach checkers, people-search lookups, and broker scans. Honest walkthroughs of what each one can and can't tell you.
Most people have no idea how much of their personal information is searchable online. Then they look. The first reaction is usually some combination of "where did this come from" and "how is this legal." Both are fair questions, and we cover them elsewhere. This post is about the looking.
You don't have to pay to start. Ten free tools, listed below, can show you a rough map of what's exposed before you decide whether to do anything about it.
The short answer: start with Have I Been Pwned for breached passwords, Mozilla Monitor for ongoing breach alerts, and a Spokeo or Whitepages self-search to see what people-search sites publish about you. Combined, those three take 10 minutes and give you 80% of the picture.
TL;DR
- Free breach checkers (HIBP, Mozilla Monitor) tell you which leaked databases contain your email or password.
- People-search lookups (Spokeo, Whitepages, That's Them, Pipl) show you what data brokers have published.
- Free "scan" tools from paid services (Privacy Bee, DeleteMe, Optery) inventory broker exposure but ask for your email.
- Google killed its own "Results About You" dark-web scanner in February 2026. The image-and-text search part still works.
- No free tool gets all of it — but using three or four together gets close.
The 10 tools, in order of usefulness
1. Have I Been Pwned — haveibeenpwned.com
The original. Built by Troy Hunt, who has, for over a decade, ingested public breach data and made it queryable. Type in your email; HIBP tells you which breaches it appeared in and what kind of data was exposed.
It's the most authoritative free breach checker because the underlying dataset is the corpus almost every other tool licenses or imitates. The site also offers a Pwned Passwords lookup — check if a specific password (hashed locally in your browser) has ever appeared in a breach.
2. Mozilla Monitor — monitor.mozilla.org
Mozilla's free, ongoing breach-monitoring service. Add up to five emails; Mozilla watches the HIBP dataset on your behalf and alerts you when a new breach includes one of yours. A paid "Plus" tier adds broker scanning, but the free tier alone is worth setting up since most people forget to manually re-check HIBP.
3. Google "Results About You" — myactivity.google.com/results-about-you
A Google tool that finds web pages indexed by Google containing your name, address, phone, or email — and lets you request removal from Google's index. Caveat: this removes the result from Google Search. It does not delete the underlying page. The data is still there; it's just harder to find via Google.
Note: in February 2026, Google shut down its companion "Dark Web Report" feature. The "Results About You" search-removal tool still operates.
4. Privacy Bee Free Scan — privacybee.com
Privacy Bee is a paid removal service ($197/year), but the free scan checks 100+ broker sites for your name and shows which have profiles on you. Enter name and city; they email the results.
Honest tradeoff: the free scan is lead-gen for the paid service, so the pitch is enthusiastic. The scan data is real and useful.
5. DeleteMe Free Scan — joindeleteme.com
DeleteMe (by Abine) is one of the oldest broker-removal services. Their free scan checks 50+ sites and emails you a summary. The report is reasonably honest about what they would remove if you upgraded — but it doesn't remove anything itself. To file removals manually, see our 50-site opt-out list.
6. Optery Free Scan — optery.com
Optery's free scan checks ~70 broker sites and includes screenshots of any profile pages found in your name. The screenshots let you confirm a result is actually you versus someone with a similar name. Paid tier starts at $3.99/month, the cheapest in the category.
7. Spokeo (search yourself) — spokeo.com
Spokeo is itself a data broker, not a privacy tool. But searching yourself is free up to a teaser showing known addresses, age, relatives, phone numbers, and email associations. The full report requires payment.
The teaser shows what anyone — scammer, stalker, recruiter, curious neighbor — can find about you for the price of a Spokeo subscription. To remove yourself, follow our Spokeo opt-out guide.
8. Whitepages (search yourself) — whitepages.com
Same logic as Spokeo. Search your name and city; Whitepages shows address history, phone numbers, age range, and associated people. Whitepages lists contact info for over 250 million people and is a high-priority opt-out.
9. That's Them — thatsthem.com
Free people-search with no paid-tier upsell on the lookup itself. Enter a name, address, phone number, or email; it returns aggregated profile data. The unique feature: search by email or phone alone and see associated names and addresses.
This is the fastest way to test whether a given email or phone of yours has leaked into the broker ecosystem. Search your "private" Gmail. Search your cell number. The results are often surprising.
10. Pipl — pipl.com
Pipl is now mostly a B2B identity-verification platform, but the consumer-facing people search still returns basic results free. Useful as a cross-check against Spokeo and Whitepages. If a profile shows on all three, it's been widely syndicated.
Bonus: Leak Check Me Free Scan — leakcheckme.com
We'd be remiss not to mention our own. Leak Check Me's free scan checks known breach exposure and public identity links, then shows the joined picture — what's exposed and which records connect to which. A one-time scrub mission is $20. No subscription.
Comparison table
| Tool | What it checks | Free? | Requires email? | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Have I Been Pwned | Breached password / email databases | Yes (no signup) | No (just type email) | Global |
| Mozilla Monitor | Ongoing breach alerts (HIBP corpus) | Yes (signup) | Yes | Global |
| Google "Results About You" | Google Search index for your info | Yes (Google account) | Yes (Google login) | Global |
| Privacy Bee Free Scan | 100+ data broker sites | Yes (signup) | Yes | US + EU |
| DeleteMe Free Scan | 50+ data broker sites | Yes (signup) | Yes | Primarily US |
| Optery Free Scan | ~70 broker sites with screenshots | Yes (signup) | Yes | US |
| Spokeo (self-search) | Your Spokeo profile (teaser) | Free teaser, paid full | No | US |
| Whitepages (self-search) | Your Whitepages profile (teaser) | Free teaser, paid full | No | US |
| That's Them | Aggregated broker data by name/email/phone | Yes | No | US |
| Pipl | Aggregated people-search data | Limited free, paid B2B | No | Global |
| Leak Check Me (bonus) | Breaches + broker sites, joined | Yes (signup) | Yes | US |
What these tools cannot tell you
Honesty section. These free tools have real limits.
They don't show every broker. Over 4,000 data brokers operate in the U.S. Even thorough free scans cover a few hundred — mainly consumer-facing ones (Spokeo, Whitepages, etc.). The bigger commercial brokers — Acxiom, LiveRamp, Oracle Data Cloud, Equifax, Experian — operate behind the scenes and almost never appear in free scans.
They don't show the dark web in any meaningful way. "Dark web monitoring" is a popular marketing claim, but in practice it means scanning a curated corpus of leaked databases — basically a paid mirror of HIBP plus some hacker-forum scraping. Anyone telling you they can "remove your data from the dark web" is lying. Once leaked, leaked data is gone forever.
They don't show data that's about to leak. No tool predicts the next breach. The corpus only grows when an incident becomes public — usually weeks or months after the actual compromise.
They don't tell you what matters. A scanner says "your name is on 47 broker sites." Whether that's bad depends on what's published, who's reading, and what else of yours is leaked. The link between your records is the real risk — that requires interpretation, not a number.
What you can do today
- Spend 5 minutes on Have I Been Pwned. Type in every email you've ever used. Note any that show breaches. Change any passwords that might still be in use anywhere.
- Sign up for Mozilla Monitor. It's free and it's the lowest-effort way to be notified of future breaches automatically.
- Self-search on Spokeo, Whitepages, and That's Them. Even just the free teasers. Note your home address, age, phone, and relatives if any are listed. That's what's publicly indexable about you right now.
- Run two free broker scans (e.g., Optery and DeleteMe or Privacy Bee). Compare the lists. Anything that appears on both is high-confidence exposure worth addressing.
- Decide your next step. Either start filing opt-outs yourself using our 50-site guide, or hand it off. Either way, the goal is the same: shrink the joined profile that ties all your records together.
Free tools are reconnaissance. They tell you what's there. They don't fix it. The fix is opting out, scrubbing what you can, and patrolling for relistings — because broker sites are stubborn and your data tends to come back two to six months after removal.
If you want help with that part, leakcheckme.com runs a scan, prepares eligible opt-out actions after authorization, and patrols for re-additions. One-time $20 scrub mission, $19/mo patrol. No annual lock-in. You shouldn't need a subscription forever.
Sources
- Have I Been Pwned
- Mozilla Monitor
- Google "Results About You"
- Consumer Reports: How to Remove Your Contact Info From Online People-Search Sites
- Mozilla Monitor FAQ — data sourced from Have I Been Pwned
- gblock.app: Google Just Killed the One Tool That Told You If Your Data Was on the Dark Web
- Optery Free Opt-Out Guides