You can reduce it substantially. You cannot erase it, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something.

Work in this order, because doing it backwards wastes the effort: find out what is actually published, cut off whatever is still feeding it, get the listings taken down, and move your practice onto a number that is not your personal one so the next cycle has nothing to pick up.

The first step is the one people skip and it is the one that changes behaviour. Search your own name — full name, name plus city, name plus profession — and look at what comes back. Therapists who do this are routinely unsettled by what is already there. One described finding her private number and home address posted publicly by sites she had never heard of. Another found that for a few dollars, anyone could buy her phone numbers, home address, previous addresses, birthdate and associated email addresses in a single report.

That is the actual landscape. It is not one leak, it is an industry that aggregates public records and resells them, and your number is in it because it was attached to something else — a registration, a directory, an old listing.

Where it came from

Knowing the source matters, because a takedown without fixing the source is a task you will repeat every year.

You published it professionally. A directory profile, a website contact page, an invoice, a form. This is the most common and the easiest to fix.

Somebody else published it. A practice administrator handing it out because it seemed simpler is a documented pattern, and it happens without consent and without anyone thinking to mention it.

A domain registration. If you registered a practice website with your own details and no privacy option, that record may be public.

A business registration. Registrations create public records by design; what is included varies by jurisdiction.

Data aggregators. They assemble the above into a profile and sell it. They are the layer that turns three separate small exposures into a single searchable one.

Getting listings removed

Most aggregator sites have an opt-out process. It is tedious, it must be repeated per site, and removal is often not permanent — profiles reappear when the source records get re-crawled.

There is a formal route behind the opt-out form, and it is worth knowing about even though it is slower than the form. Federal privacy law applies to "organizations that collect, use, or disclose personal information in the course of a commercial activity," and personal information there means "any factual or subjective information, recorded or not, about an identifiable individual" — a description that fits a site selling a report about you. Two of the ten principles it publishes are individual access and challenging compliance (Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada).

The order the regulator asks for is the order the opt-out already puts you in. "Always try to resolve the issue with the organization you had a problem with before reporting a concern to the OPC," it says, and "if you do not take this step first, we may not be able to accept your complaint" (OPC, filing a formal privacy complaint). So the opt-out request is not just the practical first step, it is the one that keeps the complaint available if the site ignores you.

Practically: start with the sites that came up in your own search rather than a generic list, keep a record of every opt-out with the date, and re-check in six months. Some people pay a removal service to run this on a schedule. That is a reasonable use of money if the searching itself is distressing, and it does not achieve anything you could not do yourself.

Cutting off the supply

Stop publishing it. Replace it everywhere you control with a practice number and a practice email — website, directory listings, invoices, intake and consent paperwork, insurers, referral letters, your email signature.

Tell anyone who might hand it out that they may not. Explicitly, once, in writing, to any admin, clinic or colleague who has it.

Use privacy options on registrations. Where a domain or business registration offers one, take it.

Stop using it as a login and recovery number for anything professional. Those records leak in ways you never see.

Then move the practice off it

This is the step that makes the rest hold. As long as your personal number is the number your practice runs on, every new form, listing and referral is another publication event, and you will be doing takedowns forever.

Choosing a replacement is its own decision — a second handset, a second line on your existing phone, an app-based line — and the mechanism matters much less than that it is not your own number.

What you cannot undo

Your personal number will stay in circulation somewhere. People who already have it will keep it. Some aggregator you never find will keep a record. The realistic goal is that it stops being the number attached to your professional name, so that a client, a former client or a stranger looking you up finds a practice line rather than the phone in your pocket.

That is achievable, and it is most of the benefit. The rest is a maintenance task: search yourself once a year, and fix what has come back.

About Rivet

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