A few weeks ago one of my friends warned me about Infobel.com and how easy it is to get the phone number and address of a person, if that person has a landline contract. Last year, Chema Alonso posted about searching owners of phone numbers with Infobel (Spanish), and shown different examples to get the number, and how to prevent theft of your identity. In this post I’m going to tell you how to delete your data on Infobel.

Infobel database

Within the site, there is a section where you can get both individuals and companies information:

You can even verify that this information has already been indexed by Google. Although the content is removed from the site, will still appear as a result of any of the following searches: site:infobel.com Full Name, or site:infobel.com phone, or site:infobel.com town.

To remove this information, the first thing to do is request to Infobel through this link.

They don’t say how long it takes to remove your information from their database and they don’t specify if this information will be removed of Google index. I’ve checked that usually It takes about 2 days. However, this is not enough, because even your information no longer exists in the Infobel database, it is still present in the Google index. On the other hand, we can see the Infobel robots.txt file where appears various combinations as disallow, but there is no restriction for /es/spain/people.aspx, which is what the residents of Spain could affect.

Google index

I didn’t find a way to contact Infobel. All contact options go to the same form. That is why I decided to try the Request to remove search results under the data protection law in Europe that Google provides.

In the field for the explanation of why this removal is requested I argued that:

Translation: This URL has been removed from Infobel.com, but It’s still remaining in the Google index. Because of that, It’s possible to get this information through site: FULL_NAME. My personal information is available, such as my phone number and my address.

As identification document I sent a receipt from the bank, hiding the numbering of the bill, which contained my name. In just two days, I had resolved the issue with Google and my data disappeared.

Cheers!