ChatGPT can still help you track down every website selling your name, phone number, email, and home address, and it can still write the removal requests for you. But the version of this trend spreading online right now - where ChatGPT's "agent mode" opens each site itself and submits the forms automatically - stopped working. OpenAI quietly pulled agent mode in early August 2026, and as of 22nd August 2026 it has not come back.
That matters because most of the posts describing this trick were written before the feature disappeared
You ask ChatGPT to search the internet for every page carrying your full name, phone number, email address, or home address, and to return the exact page - not just the site - where each one appears. People-search and data-broker platforms like Spokeo, Whitepages, and BeenVerified were the ones showing up most, often sites the person had never heard of and never gave permission to.
From there, users asked ChatGPT to draft the deletion request for each listing. It wrote personalised removal emails in seconds, citing the specific site's opt-out process. The final step - the one that made the trend spread - was agent mode. Turned on, it could open a browser on its own, fill in each site's removal form, and submit it without the person clicking through anything themselves. Some people then told it to recheck the same sites weekly and resubmit if their details resurfaced.
Why the automatic part stopped working
OpenAI's help centre now opens with a direct notice: agent mode is no longer available, and the company points users toward "ChatGPT Work" for multi-step tasks and a cloud browser tool for anything browser-based. The removal happened without an announced deprecation period, which is why people who had this running on autopilot only noticed when a scheduled task quietly stopped producing anything.
Work is not a straight swap. It handles research, document creation, and public web browsing, but it cannot drive a browser through a site that requires you to be logged in, or pause mid-task and hand control back to you the way agent mode did. That handoff was what let agent mode push a form all the way to submission on sites with account gates. Removal forms that don't require login may still go through via the cloud browser tool; ones that do generally need a human to finish the last step.
What still works today
The research half of the trend is untouched. Ask ChatGPT to search for every page online carrying your personal details, and it will still return a list with the specific broker sites and the direct opt-out link for each. Ask it to draft the removal request text, and it will still produce a personalised email or form-response for every entry on that list.
A typical run for a Ghanaian name returns a shorter list than the same search for someone in the US or UK, usually two or three broker-style listings alongside older entries like a résumé-scraping site or a business directory pulling from a LinkedIn profile. That's the pattern worth expecting going in: fewer people-search hits, more of the exposure sitting in scraped professional data than in the classic "home address for sale" listings Americans deal with.
You'll need to open each opt-out link yourself and paste in the drafted request, or check whether the cloud browser tool supports that particular site. It's slower than the one-click version people were describing a few months ago, but the finding-and-drafting work - which used to take hours by hand - still happens in seconds.
One caution though: pasting your own name, phone number, and address into any chatbot to get a personalised draft means that data now sits in a conversation history somewhere. OpenAI's own privacy documentation is explicit that removing information from ChatGPT's responses does not remove it from the broker sites themselves, and the reverse is also true - getting a broker site to delete your listing doesn't erase what you typed into the chat.
Why one round of removals doesn't finish the job
Data brokers rebuild their listings from public records - voter rolls, court filings, property records - so a name can reappear on a site months after it was removed. The weekly recheck that made the original trend feel powerful was itself running through agent mode via scheduled tasks, and OpenAI's documentation confirms those scheduled agent invocations counted against the same feature that's now gone. Anyone who had that recurring check running should assume it stopped the same week agent mode did, silently, with no notification.
The practical fix is a manual one for now: a monthly calendar reminder to rerun the same search-and-draft request through ChatGPT. Subscription services such as Incogni and DeleteMe automate the recurring part for a monthly fee if that manual cadence isn't sustainable.
Most of the data-broker sites this trend targets are registered in the United States and built around US public records, which means a Ghanaian reader's exposure on them is usually lower than an American reader's. Ghana's own framework - the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843) - gives people the right to request erasure from data controllers registered here, enforced through the Data Protection Commission, which runs on a separate complaint process from anything a US broker site offers.
The more common exposure route for Ghanaians is scraped or breached databases rather than people-search sites: old account leaks, résumé-scraping sites, and directories that pull from LinkedIn or business registries. Running a check on Have I Been Pwned alongside the ChatGPT search gives a fuller picture than the broker-site method alone.
The complaint route under Act 843 is a two-step one. You raise the request with the data controller first - the company or platform actually holding your information - and under Section 39(2) they're required to respond within 21 days. If they refuse or ignore the request, the next step is a formal complaint to the Data Protection Commission through dataprotection.org.gh, which can investigate and order the data deleted. That process only reaches data controllers registered in Ghana, which is the main limit of Act 843 for this kind of cleanup: it has no direct authority over a US-based broker site, so the ChatGPT-drafted removal email remains the faster route for anything hosted abroad.
Frequently Asked Questions(FAQs)
Is ChatGPT's agent mode still available?
No. OpenAI's help centre states it is no longer available, as of 22nd August 2026, with no confirmed return date.
Can ChatGPT still find where my personal information is posted online?
Yes. The search-and-list function is unaffected; only the automatic form submission is gone.
Do I need agent mode to get a broker site to delete my listing?
No. You can still copy the drafted removal request and submit it yourself, or try the cloud browser tool for sites without a login requirement.
Will my information stay removed once a site deletes it?
Not permanently. Brokers rebuild listings from public records, so periodic rechecking is still necessary.
Does this process apply the same way for someone in Ghana?
Partially. Most targeted sites are US-based, so Act 843 and the Data Protection Commission cover a different, narrower category of exposure - mainly Ghana-registered data controllers rather than foreign broker sites.