Digital footprint checker: see what's public about you

What is a digital footprint?

Your digital footprint is everything about you that can be found online. It has two halves. Your active footprint is what you put out yourself: social profiles, forum posts, reviews, comments, photos, a personal site, the gamer tag you picked at fourteen. Your passive footprint is what others collect about you without you posting it: browsing data held by ad networks, records bought and resold by data brokers, public records such as property and court filings, and the data exposed when a company you used gets breached.

People forget old accounts, so they underestimate the active half. They never see the passive half, so they underestimate that too. A good digital footprint search looks at both. Usernames are the fastest way into the active half, because people reuse the same handle for years across many sites. Your email address and your name are the best way into the passive half.

How to check your digital footprint, step by step

Set aside about 45 minutes the first time. You will be faster on later check-ups because you will already have your list.

1. List your usernames and email addresses. Write down every handle you have used, including old gamer tags, school nicknames and variants with numbers or underscores, plus each email address you have signed up with.
2. Scan each username. Run every handle through the username checker above. It looks for public profiles on 3,166 sites and marks each one Found, Not found, Blocked or Unknown.
3. Check each email address. Search each address in quotes in a search engine and note which services still send you mail. Our own email check, which will cover public avatars and known data breaches, is coming soon.
4. Search your name in search engines. Search your full name in quotes, alone and with your city, school or employer. Look at web, image and news results, and repeat in a private window so personal results do not skew what you see.
5. Review old and forgotten accounts. Open each Found result, confirm it is really yours, and decide whether to keep, lock down or delete it. Your email inbox is a good second source: search it for "welcome" and "verify your account".
6. Check people-search and data-broker sites. Search your name on the people-search sites that rank for it. These pages often list addresses, relatives and phone numbers collected from public records.
7. Make a cleanup list and work through it. Note each account or listing, what it exposes and the action you will take. Then delete, edit or opt out, and re-check in a few months.

Reading username results

A Found result means a public profile page answered for that exact handle. It might be you, or someone else who happens to use the same name, so open it before you act. Not found means no public profile answered. Blocked and Unknownmean the site refused or gave an unclear answer, so check those by hand. Found results often show profile details such as a display name, avatar and bio, so you can tell faster whether an account is yours. You can search up to five usernames at once and export the results as JSON or CSV to keep as a checklist. Our results guide explains each status in more detail.

Reading email results

Our email checker is coming soon. It is planned to check the address format, whether the domain has working mail servers, and whether it is a disposable, free or role address such as info@ or support@. It will also look for a profile picture tied to the address on a public avatar service, since that quietly links an email to your face and name, and it may ask a third-party breach-data provider whether the address appears in known breaches. The email checker page has a preview.

What about my phone number?

People often look for a digital footprint checker by phone number. A phone check is coming soon on our home page. It will validate a number, not trace who owns it, and it will not search people-search databases. To see where your own number is published today, search it in quotes (with and without dashes) and look through people-search listings for your name.

How to reduce your digital footprint

Delete or lock down old accounts

Accounts you no longer use only add risk. They hold your data, they can be breached, and an abandoned profile can be taken over and used to impersonate you. For each Found result that is yours and unused, sign in and look for “delete account” or “close account” in the settings. If you cannot get in, use the site's account-recovery page or contact its support. For accounts you keep, set profiles to private where that makes sense, remove your birthday, phone number and location, and prune old posts. Our post on finding old accounts has more ways to track down forgotten sign-ups.

Tighten privacy settings

On each platform you keep, check who can see your posts, friends list and contact details, whether search engines may index your profile, and whether people can find you by email or phone number. Remove location data from photos before you post them. Turn off ad personalization in your main accounts, which limits how much of your activity feeds the passive footprint.

Opt out of people-search and data-broker sites

People-search sites compile addresses, relatives, ages and phone numbers from public records and other sources. Most let you opt out for free, though you usually have to repeat it site by site, and listings can come back. The US Federal Trade Commission explains how this works in What To Know About People Search Sites That Sell Your Information. If you live in California, the state privacy agency runs the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP), which lets residents send one deletion request to registered data brokers, and it publishes the California data broker registry. Opting out does not remove information from government records themselves.

Clean up search results

If a page you control shows up for your name, edit or delete it, and search engines will drop it over time. For pages you do not control, ask the site owner to remove the content. Major search engines also offer request forms for removing certain personal information, such as contact details, from their results.

Breach hygiene: protect what is already out there

You cannot undo a breach, but you can limit the damage. If your email shows up in a breach, or you are simply not sure:

• Change reused passwords first. Attackers try leaked email and password pairs on other sites. Any password you used in more than one place should be replaced everywhere it was used.
• Use a password manager. It generates and remembers a long, unique password for every site, so one breach exposes one account and nothing else.
• Turn on two-factor authentication (2FA). Start with email, banking and your main social accounts. An authenticator app or a security key is stronger than a text-message code.
• Watch for phishing. Breached data is used to write convincing emails. Be wary of messages that mention a real service you use and ask you to sign in through a link.
• Secure your email account above all. It is the reset key for nearly everything else. Give it the strongest password and 2FA.

Use this for yourself, responsibly

This digital footprint finder is meant for a self-audit: checking your own usernames and your own email addresses. Results are leads to verify, not proof of identity, because two people can share a handle. WhatsMyName Apps is not a consumer reporting agency, and results must not be used to make decisions about credit, employment, housing, insurance or any other purpose covered by the FCRA. Do not use it to track, monitor or harass anyone.

To go further, check your handles one platform at a time with our platform username checkers, browse the full list of supported sites, or read how the checks work.

Frequently asked questions

Related tools and guides

• Reverse username lookup
• OSINT username search
• Name checker (usernames and domains)
• Email checker
• How to check your digital footprint
• Find old accounts and shrink your digital footprint
• What is my username? How to find the ones you used
• Social media search by username
• Search a username on every site · Platform username checkers · All 3,166 supported sites
• How to read your results · How it works

WhatsMyName Apps is an independent tool, not affiliated with the WhatsMyName project, Sherlock, Maigret or any site it checks.