Finds your phone number and address on the open web and gets them taken down
TL;DR Unlistly is a removal service for Indians whose personal details are easy to find online - phone numbers on directory sites, home addresses in old PDFs and ID scans in public folders. It searches, files takedown requests through each platform's own process and re-checks every quarter. Individuals pay a yearly fee, and employers can buy it for exposed staff.
Ask any doctor, woman creator, lawyer or journalist in India how strangers got their mobile number. Directory and people-search sites copy details from public records and scraped pages, and removing a record from one site does nothing to the original source[1]. The biggest search engine now lets people ask for search results showing their phone number, home address or email to be removed, but some of those features are still rolling out in certain markets only[2].
The paid services that do this abroad don't cover India. One service lists the US, Canada, Europe and the UK[3]. Another serves the US, Canada, Australia and the UK[4].
So Indians are left filing requests one by one, if they even know where to look.
What it does, in legal terms: an assisted request service. Unlistly does not hack, buy leaked data or contact criminals. It finds information already public and asks the hosts to take it down under their own policies and Indian law.
A customer shares the details they want hidden - numbers, addresses, family names and vehicle numbers. Unlistly searches the open web, search engines and known Indian directories, then shows a list of exposures ranked by risk. A home address next to a photo comes first. For each one it files the right request, which could be a search-engine removal form, a site's opt-out, a platform report or, once the DPDP Rules take full effect, a formal erasure request that the business must answer within ninety days[5]. It re-scans every quarter, because data has a habit of coming back.
The seed promised deep web scanning and automated removal. I've reframed it, because data on criminal forums cannot be taken down and India has no mapped data broker industry with standard opt-out forms. The open web is where a stalker looks first, and that's fixable.
The buyer is a person with a public-facing job or a safety worry - women creators, doctors, lawyers, journalists and people leaving abusive relationships. Global services charge US$7.99–14.99 a month on yearly plans (about ₹770–1,450)[3]. Unlistly's own price is untested. A second buyer is the employer, such as a hospital or news outlet, paying for staff who face harassment.
The DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025 and phase in over 18 months[5]. When the rights provisions apply, every business holding a person's data must act on an erasure request within ninety days[5]. That turns polite requests into legal ones. The search engine's removal tool for contact details also gives a free, repeatable channel for the biggest exposure[2].
I couldn't find a public figure on how many Indians want personal data removed, or any count of Indian people-search sites. The signal is indirect - established removal services price at US$7.99 a month and up in their markets[3], yet none lists India[3][4]. Treat demand as the first thing to test, not an assumption.
Paid removal services automate removal requests in Western markets, but neither lists India[3][4]. The search engine's own removal tool covers search results only, not the source pages[2]. Indian cyber-safety helplines and lawyers help people after harassment starts. The gap is a paid, preventive service that knows Indian sites and keeps checking. Fair warning, the competitor scan was limited because web search was down during research.
| Difficulty | Moderate (39/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹30–60 L |
| Time to launch | 3–5 months |
Search and request tracking are simple to build. The hard parts are manual. Every Indian site has a different and often unanswered contact route, so success comes down to plain persistence. Handling customers who are being harassed also needs care and clear limits on what you promise.
No licence is needed to run an assisted removal service. What you need is care about how you file and what you hold.
Never touch private systems or buy leaked data.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't trust AI to confirm that a name match is really your customer. A wrong match means filing a takedown for a stranger, so a person checks every one.
Want to work out the AI layer for Unlistly? Talk to Yash →
I like this one for a founder with trust-and-safety or legal-operations experience and a feel for marketing to women and professionals. If you're expecting full automation then it is a poor fit. First prove that you can remove 60% of found exposures for 30 paying customers within 90 days.
Plan for roughly ₹30–60 L, mostly for scanning tools, a small operations team and marketing to individuals.
No licence. You need company registration and GST, strong security for customer data, and legal advice on filing requests on someone's behalf.
Yes. Services like this already run in the US and Europe. The removal rights and directories differ by country, so check your local law first.
The free Unlistly validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the DPDP and platform-rules checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for likely customers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Unlistly or something close to it? The make-or-break work is getting Indian sites to actually act on removal requests, and that's exactly the sort of thing I help founders plan for. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.