Classmates Opt Out Guide
Finding your personal details or yearbook information listed on Classmates can feel invasive, especially if you never intended for your old school records to be public. The good news is that you can remove your profile by following a few simple, step-by-step instructions. If you’d prefer not to handle it yourself, Vanish Me can automatically manage your Classmates opt-out — along with dozens of other data broker sites.
What is Classmates?
Classmates is an online social networking site launched in 1995 that helps people reconnect with former school friends, colleagues, and military service members. Over time, it became one of the largest databases of digitized yearbooks, school rosters, and personal information tied to educational history.
A Classmates profile may include your name, graduation year, school attended, photos, and potentially other identifying details. Much of this content is pulled from yearbook scans and user submissions, which means you could appear on the site even if you never created an account yourself. Classmates also encourages users to share updates, upload photos, and interact with old acquaintances, further expanding its database.
While some find value in reconnecting with old friends, others see Classmates as a privacy concern because it makes personal history searchable without consent. The platform is now owned by PeopleConnect, the same company that operates data brokers like Intelius and TruthFinder. Many people therefore choose to opt out of Classmates to limit how much of their personal and school history is publicly visible online.
How to Remove Your Information from Classmates (Step by Step)
Classmates is owned by parent company People Connect. People Connect has a centralized tool that opts you out of all of the data broker sites that they own, which includes:
Classmates® – a longstanding social network for reuniting with old school friends.
Intelius – known for reverse phone/address lookups and background checks.
TruthFinder – a deep-dive people search platform offering detailed personal reports.
Instant Checkmate – another robust background-check service.
US Search – a legacy people search site they also operate.
For instructions on removing your information from Classmates, please reference the instructions we created in our Intelius guide here.
Set & Forget Privacy
Continuous monitoring, zero chores.
Keep spam calls and creepy lookups down with ongoing people-search scans.
- Finds re-listings fast
- Re-files removals for you
- Clean progress reports showing what’s been sent
Results depend on each site’s policy & processing time.
How Long Does Classmates Take to Remove Your Info?
Once you submit an opt-out request, Classmates typically removes your profile within 5 to 7 business days. In some cases, it may happen sooner, but yearbook-related content can take slightly longer to disappear. Because Classmates pulls from archived school records and yearbooks, there’s a chance your information may reappear if new content is digitized. If that happens, you’ll need to repeat the opt-out process. To avoid the hassle, Vanish Me can automatically monitor Classmates and re-submit removals for you across multiple broker sites.
One Removal Down, More to Go
Clearing your information from Classmates is an important win, but most people are surprised to find their details spread across dozens of other people-search websites. Each opt-out reduces your digital footprint and makes your information harder to exploit.
Here are a few more guides to continue your progress:
Step by step, you can protect your privacy across the web and stay ahead of data brokers. To save yourself time, sign up for Vanish Me to automate the data broker removal process.
Classmates Important Links:
One opt-out down. Hundreds more to go.
People-finder and data broker sites frequently re-add your information and new sites appear all the time. Vanish Me scans, removes, and keeps monitoring automatically—so your data stays off these sites.
- Automated removals across hundreds of brokers
- Continuous re-checks to stop info from resurfacing
- New brokers tracked and added to coverage
Live example metrics from a typical removal cycle.
