ForgeStrike: Automated Data Broker Removal That Runs on Your Machine

Your Personal Data Has a Price Tag. You Were Not Asked.

Data brokers are legal. That is the first thing to understand. Companies like FastPeopleSearch, Spokeo, and Whitepages operate entirely within US law, aggregating public records, social media profiles, voter registrations, and purchase history into detailed profiles of private individuals. They sell access to anyone willing to pay a few dollars.

The information they publish is not abstract. It is your current home address. Your phone number. Your estimated income. The names and ages of people who live with you. The names of your relatives. A list of addresses you have lived at over the past decade.

Each of the seven brokers ForgeStrike targets has an opt-out process. Each process is different. Some require a verification email. Some require navigating multiple confirmation steps. Some re-list removed records within 90 days. The complexity is not accidental.

ForgeShield Found the Problem. ForgeStrike Fixes It.

ForgeStrike came directly out of ForgeShield, the Greyforge personal security scanner. ForgeShield scans your digital footprint and generates a report: here is where you are exposed, here is how serious it is, here is what to do about it.

The problem with reports is that they require action. Every ForgeShield scan that found data broker exposure handed the user a list of links to opt-out pages and a description of what to do. Most people looked at the list and did nothing, not because they did not care, but because the actual process is genuinely tedious.

That observation became the design brief for ForgeStrike: what if the tool just did the removal work itself?

The prototype targeted a single broker. It navigated the opt-out flow, filled the forms, and submitted the request. It worked. Then it was extended to a second broker, a third, until the current build covers all seven major platforms. The technical challenge was not automating the forms. It was automating them in a way the sites would not detect and block.

Data brokers have strong incentives to make opt-outs difficult. They use fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and challenge systems designed to identify automated traffic. ForgeStrike handles this with a proprietary stealth engine that randomizes every detectable attribute of a browser session: fingerprints, typing cadence, mouse movement patterns, timing intervals, and geolocation signals. Each session looks, to the broker's defenses, like a human working through the form by hand.

Three Phases, Fully Automated

ForgeStrike takes an identity matrix: your legal names, digital aliases, email addresses, and city history. That profile is the target. From there, three phases run automatically.

The Ghost Inbox: No Permanent Email Exposed

Most data broker opt-out flows require email verification. You submit the removal request, the broker sends a confirmation link to an email address, and you click it to finalize the removal. This creates a problem: the email address you use for verification gets added to the broker's database.

ForgeStrike solves this with the Ghost Inbox. Each strike session generates a fresh, ephemeral email address that exists only for the duration of the removal flow. Incoming confirmation emails are monitored in real time. When a verification link arrives, ForgeStrike clicks it automatically and marks the removal as confirmed. When the session ends, the inbox is discarded.

Your real email address is never submitted to any broker during the opt-out process. It is provided as the identity target to scan for, not as the contact point for verification.

Local-First by Design

ForgeStrike runs entirely on your machine. The web portal, the strike engine, the Ghost Inbox, the audit database — all of it is local. The only outbound connections are to the broker opt-out pages themselves: the same connections you would make manually if you were doing this by hand.

This is a deliberate architectural choice. The problem with most privacy tools is the contradiction at their core: they ask you to solve a data exposure problem by sending your data to another third party. A service that removes your records from Spokeo by accepting your full identity profile on their servers has not actually solved your privacy problem. It has created a new one.

The 7-Broker Arsenal

ForgeStrike targets the seven largest people-search platforms by traffic and data coverage. Together, these sites account for a significant majority of consumer data broker exposure for US residents.

Seven is the current starting point. There are over 200 active data brokers operating in the US. ForgeStrike's architecture supports adding new brokers as modular plugins. The pattern is consistent: implement the broker's opt-out flow, register it in the arsenal. Expanding coverage is an engineering task, not a redesign. The roadmap includes a second tier of brokers as the platform matures.

Why Not Just Use DeleteMe?

DeleteMe is the best-known service in this space. At $129/year per person, it submits removal requests on your behalf, monitors for re-listings, and sends quarterly reports. It works. For people who want a fully managed, hands-off service with continuous monitoring, it is a reasonable option.

ForgeStrike is built for a different use case. The differences are structural, not cosmetic.

Frequently Asked Questions