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. Private-equity firm H.I.G. Capital invested in Intelius in 2015, and PeopleConnect Holdings, Inc., which H.I.G. described as its affiliate, completed the acquisition of Classmates that year. PeopleConnect's privacy policy names The Control Group Media Company, LLC, doing business as PeopleConnect, out of San Diego.

H.I.G. Capital now lists its Intelius investment as realized on its portfolio page; who owns the group now isn't publicly documented.

The registry is where the structure becomes legible. PeopleConnect itself isn't 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 linking those registrants to PeopleConnect.

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 targets.

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 alleging 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.