Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Found Targets’ Addresses Online. Here’s How To Hide Yours.

Anyone can go online and find out where you live — even, perhaps, the alleged shooter of several Minnesota lawmakers.

When police found the car that is believed to belong to Vance Boelter, the man accused of assassinating Democratic Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband and shooting a state senator and his wife in their homes, they found notebooks, according to a criminal complaint in the case.

In one notebook was a handwritten list of 11 common “people search” sites, which are data broker sites that people can use to easily look up home addresses and phone addresses for free or for small fees.

The sites written down in this notebook included TruePeopleSearch, Spokeo, Pipl, PeopleFinders, BeenVerified, Whitepages, TruthFinder, Intelius, Ownerly, US Search and PeopleLooker.

In total, authorities also found the handwritten names of 45 Minnesota state and federal officials listed in notebooks that are believed to be Boelter’s.

“Boelter planned his attack carefully,” said acting U.S. attorney Joseph Thompson in a news conference. “He researched his victims and their families. He used the internet and other tools to find their addresses and names, the names of the family members.”

Whether or not Boelter actually used these data broker sites to track his targets has yet to be proven, but he wouldn’t be the first to do so.

“What this individual allegedly did is what abusive individuals have done for decades,” said Justin Sherman, a data broker expert and scholar in residence at Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“They want to find out where someone lives, whether that’s someone they’re currently seeing or an ex-wife who moved to a new state. … They will pull up one of these sites, they’ll type a name, and they’ll put in their credit card, and with no background check or vetting, and for a couple bucks, they will get that information,” Sherman explained.

“What happened here is horrific, and what’s even more horrifying that a lot of people don’t realize is that this similar playbook has happened many times,” he said. “It just has not gotten into the news.”

Data brokers use automated internet scraping tools to find addresses and numbers that are listed in common public records like marriage certificates and voter registration records.

“They’ll post your name into the scraping tool and just say, ‘Hey, pull us any information that’s connected to this name and and if somewhere, an address is connected to that name, that’ll get thrown in there,’” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Public records have long existed, but the internet makes it just a few clicks away to find now.

“People-search data brokers have digitized these records and mashed them all together,” Sherman explained. “This changes the risk from someone knowing where you live, already going to the town, filling out paperwork, requesting a physical copy of a public record to, they can log on to the internet, search your name on a people-search website, and one of these data brokers will sell you someone’s home address for $1.50.”

It’s not just your information that can be revealing, but your family’s, too. For example, who you are married to is a public document, and even if you’ve been hiding your address information, a data broker may infer where you live from your spouse’s information, Schroeder said.

And one reason why these sites can sell off our most valuable private information for pennies without our consent is because there is no standard privacy law in America.

“We don’t have a federal privacy law that protects people’s information rights. It’s very state-by-state, and within states, there often are carve-outs and exceptions,” Schroeder said, citing California as one state that is ahead of the rest. California recently passed the Delete Act, which will let people delete all of their data broker information with one request, and is set to be implemented in 2026.

Of course, some people can’t opt out of having their addresses shared because they have professions that encourage or require them to do so. Hortman’s address, for example, was listed on her campaign website.

But some states are changing this. After the killing of a judge’s son in New Jersey, for example, New Jersey banned the disclosure of residential home addresses or unpublished home telephone numbers for certain individuals.

In an ideal world, this kind of government public records protection would be for everyone, experts say.

“These should be protections for all people, not just these select groups,” Sherman said. “For years, this has been a stalking and gendered violence problem, which, of course, predominantly impacts women and women of color and LGBTQ+ people.”

Until there are more government one-stop, opt-out sites, the burden will fall on individuals to figure out how to keep their home addresses out of harm’s reach.

One way to do this is to go directly to a data broker site and personally opt out. The biggest ones you might want to go to first are Spokeo, MyLife, Radaris, Whitepages, Intelius, BeenVerified, Acxiom, InfoTracer, LexisNexis and TruePeopleSearch, Schroeder said.

Once you’re on this site, you can “click whatever opt-out options there are,” Schroeder said. But the con with this approach is that it’s time-consuming and inefficient, because “There are, by some of these list counts, close to 800 different data brokers out there,” she added.

Schroeder said, in this way, opting out is “a full-time job that takes forever, because it’s not only … issuing the initial request, you also have to follow up. You’d have to check back in a week or two to see, ‘Did they actually take down the information I requested?’”

That’s why the more efficient option is to pay for a data removal service to do it on your behalf. “They take much less effort on your part. They tend to have better lists of all of the data brokers out there to go pursue,” Schroeder said. You can see which personal data removal service is best for your needs or budget.

But ultimately, having to pay money to keep yourself safe is not a comprehensive answer to this ongoing problem that the Democratic Minnesota lawmaker shootings has exposed.

Data brokers are part of a booming industry, because there is great value in collecting and selling our personal information to other companies. So it will take more than a couple opt-out forms to slow them down.

“It’s obviously infeasible to expect a consumer to take on all the work of fighting this multibillion-dollar data sale industry,” Sherman said.

But this could be the task of the government.

“It’s really unfair to expect people to suddenly become experts in technology, in their nonexistent free time, to be able to protect themselves from serious risks ― That’s the job of the government,” Schroeder said. “I hope that this is a wake-up call that this can’t continue.”

“I’m so sad that it took something this horrible for it to be a wake-up call,” she continued. “But hopefully we can prevent something like this from happening again.”