This free service, which launched about a year ago, searches data broker’s websites and takes care of the laborious process of getting your name, address, etc. deleted. With about 50,000 users, Leshner said it’s mostly made up of 30 to 50 year olds (as you would imagine his company’s privacy policy doesn’t allow them to track user data, so this age group is only an estimate from talking to clients). He said this older generation of user feels like there is a physical threat to having this information on the Internet and uses Safe Shepherd to protect the whole family.

Google doesn’t tap into the extensive world of personal information that lives just out of reach of search engines. Remarkably detailed information about your personal life resides in databases maintained by the government, corporations and publications, and all of it is publicly accessible.

Your information is for sale to all kinds of different entities. Thankfully, there's an easy way to remove it from the places where companies harvest it. Safe Shepherd has been helping people protect their privacy since being founded in October 2011.

Take Safe Shepherd, a 500 Startups-backed company focused on removing your personal info from the myriad creepy PeopleFinder sites around the net. After watching their userbase climb slowly-but-steadily since launching over 6 months ago, SafeShepherd found a way to more than double their userbase in the past month alone. From October 1st, 2011 until April 1st of this year, the company had managed to pull in about 7,400 users. They’d helped these users find roughly 200,000 personal records floating around the Internet, and had managed to get around 20,000 of these records expunged.

SafeShepherd aims to make it easier to opt out of personal information site listings. It shows you where you're listed and automates the removal process when you want to opt out. The startup, which graduated from accelerator 500 Startups in August, will let you remove up to 10 records for free. A free search for my name, however, yielded no results that were actually mine.