PeopleConnect

peopleconnect.us has careers pages, brand pages, and a blog. What it doesn't have is a search box, a subscription, or a report to sell you. It's the corporate face of a family of people-search sites, and the reason to know about it is that its removal tool reaches further in one request than any individual brand's does.

The corporate chain runs like this. PubRec, LLC, the consumer arm behind TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, merged with PeopleConnect Holdings, Inc. - the Seattle business behind Intelius and Classmates - in January 2020. Private-equity firm H.I.G. Capital had acquired Intelius outright in July 2015, and PeopleConnect Holdings bought Classmates.com that August for $30 million. The operating entity today is The Control Group Media Company, LLC, doing business as PeopleConnect, out of San Diego.

Who ultimately owns it now is not something we'll assert. H.I.G.'s involvement was last affirmatively documented at that 2020 merger, we found nothing showing an exit, and absence of evidence isn't confirmation either way.

The registry is where the structure becomes legible. PeopleConnect itself is not a registered California data broker - we searched the registry directly and there's no entry under PeopleConnect, The Control Group Media Company, or PubRec. Its brands register individually instead, and all three file from the same San Diego suite. TruthFinder, LLC covers truthfinder.com and seven more domains. Intelius, LLC files as "Intelius, US Search, US Search Pro" and covers twenty-two domains, including ussearch.com, zabasearch.com, addresses.com, publicrecords.com, and peoplelookup.com. Instant Checkmate LLC covers four. Two of those filings use @peopleconnect.us contact addresses, which is the paper trail tying the brands back to the parent.

That matters for a practical reason. If you need to escalate under California's Delete Act, the registrant is the brand, not PeopleConnect - so a complaint has to name TruthFinder, LLC or Intelius, LLC rather than the company whose suppression tool you used.

PeopleConnect publishes nothing under its own name. What follows is what its brands put out, which is what a suppression request is aimed at.

PeopleConnect's brands are separately branded, separately registered, and mostly separately opted out of - with the important exception that four of them share one suppression tool. Classmates is the odd one out on every axis.

PeopleConnect has almost no reputational record under its own name. Its brands carry it instead, and theirs is substantial - a federal order, a multi-state settlement, and tens of thousands of complaints between them.

PeopleConnect has been sued repeatedly under state right-of-publicity laws, almost always over the same practice - using someone's yearbook photograph or record to advertise a subscription. The cases have produced appellate law in two circuits and reached the Supreme Court's docket once. Its brands separately carry a federal order.