Maybe you’re good about protecting your privacy online. You don’t give out any personal information beyond what’s necessary. You may even provide lies and disinformation if a site is asking for personal stuff that’s not germane to your interaction. Still, chunks of information like your name, address, and phone number do surface on legitimate websites, and data aggregator sites hoover up these traces with glee, assembling them into personal profiles that they can sell or otherwise monetize. It’s legal. But the law also compels them to remove your data if you ask. Incogni, from well-known VPN and security vendor Surfshark, wants to be your privacy partner, helping you request data removal from dozens of aggregator websites. However, unlike with similar services, Incogni doesn’t directly track whether the brokers had your information in the first place, nor whether they removed it.
How Much Does Incogni Cost?
You can purchase one month of Incogni protection for $7.99. My company contact pointed out that brokers have 30-45 days to respond to a removal request, but Incogni will finish its initial round of account removals even if your month runs out without renewal. Opting for a yearly subscription cuts the price in half, to $3.99 per month, paid as a $47.88 yearly fee. Keeping your subscription going means that the service will keep tracking broker responses and periodically reissue its removal requests.
The Kanary costs a bit more, at $9.99 per month and $89.99 per year. Upping your yearly payment to $129.99 lets you extend privacy protection to your family, up to six people.
Abine’s DeleteMe was the first service of this type that I encountered, predating many competitors. DeleteMe protection for an individual costs about the same as The Kanary for a family, $129 per year. The company notes that significant use of human agents for thorough removal is the reason for the higher price. You can protect yourself and a partner for $229 per year or go for a family DeleteMe license (four individuals) at $329 per year.
IDX Privacy is a whole suite of privacy tools—its Forget Me component is the part that’s parallel to Incogni. This suite also includes Dark Web monitoring, identity theft remediation, a full-fledged Virtual Private Network, (VPN), and more. You get all that for $9.95 per month or $79.95 per year.
Avast BreachGuard focuses on flagging any appearances of your personal information in data breaches. However, its Personal Info Remover component can send data removal requests to about a dozen data brokers. Like Incogni, it doesn’t confirm the presence of your data on the broker sites. It just requests removal. At $39.99 per year, it’s less expensive than the rest, but it also does less to clear your data from broker sites.
Incogni costs less than all but the Avast product, even at the month-by-month subscription level. And the availability of its one-month subscription means you can give it a try without risking too much cash.
Getting Started With Incogni
Onboarding with Incogni is easy enough. You create an account with your email and a password. You enter your full name and address, which Incogni points out is necessary for data removal requests. Then you grant Incogni a (very) limited power of attorney to make those requests in your name. Choose a monthly or annual plan and you’re ready to go.
You interact with Incogni through a simple online dashboard. Right after signup, you’ll see the number of brokers that Incogni works with (currently 76) and the number slated to receive removal requests. Incogni uses an internal algorithm to decide which of those brokers are likely to have your data and immediately starts the process of requesting removal. In my case, it sent requests to 58 out of the 76.
Why limit the number of requests? Why not send an opt-out to all of them? I asked my contact at Surfshark and learned that the choice to ignore some is mostly based on your location. If a broker simply doesn’t collect data in your region, there’s no reason to ask for removal. Also, avoiding sending unnecessary requests “means that other requests will be processed quicker.”
Once you’ve reached this step, you might as well put Incogni on the back burner for a while. As the company points out, brokers legally have from 30 to 45 days to respond, and some of them use that whole time. During the process, you may receive emails from some of the brokers, though most email responses go straight to Surfshark. Just a day after I signed up, I got one stating that the broker did not have any information about me. Such responses get tallied as Rejected on the dashboard. When a broker responds saying your data was removed, that goes into the count of Completed items.
Surfshark’s instructions point out that these emails are normal, and if you find optout@privacy.surfshark.com in the list of recipients, there’s nothing you need to do. If you get a message that lacks that connection, they advise you to reply stating that Surfshark is managing your removal process, making sure to Cc the Surfshark email address.
What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?
DeleteMe seeks out your personal data on broker websites and generates periodic reports on its actions. For each broker the report either indicates it’s free of your data or spells out in detail what personal data is being removed. The Kanary reports each found instance of your personal info and reports back when removal is complete. IDX Privacy’s Forget Me module works in much the same way.
Incogni is totally different. It doesn’t seek your personal data; it just sends a removal request to the brokers that seem likely to have your data. It doesn’t check that they’ve removed the data, just reports responses from the brokers as Rejected (meaning the broker didn’t have your data) or Completed (meaning your data was removed).
Knowing this, I wasn’t too surprised to find that Incogni’s broker list is completely different from the public list of brokers checked by DeleteMe and from a list I requested from IDX Privacy. Not a single business from Incogni’s list appeared in the other two. The lists from IDX Privacy and DeleteMe are heavy with outward-facing aggregators like BeenVerified, Spokeo, and ZabaSearch, sites that offer to let you look up information about anybody (or let anybody look you up).
Incogni works with brokers at a higher level. They have descriptions like “Provides leads and calls data for insurance companies,” “Offers direct marketing mailing lists for businesses,” and “Real-time pre-validated firmographic, technographic, social data on companies and their decision makers.”
Incogni marks each broker with a data-sensitivity rating, from one to five skulls. It also tags each with a category such as Credit Scoring, Marketing, or Recruitment. Scrolling down the list, I didn’t see any marked with more than three skulls. My company contact confirmed that it would take a lot to get a four- or five-skull rating, saying “it would mean very sensitive information (SSNs or equivalent, credit card information) collected at large scale.”
Getting yourself removed from these wholesalers of personal data is clearly a good thing, but clearing your data out from the people-search sites is also beneficial. My Surfshark contact notes that the company is “currently working on expanding our coverage of people search sites.”
The legal process for requesting removal of personal data is built on a model of one person opting out from one data broker. That’s fine for individuals, but it doesn’t scale up easily to an automated process. Services like Incogni and DeleteMe must interact with each broker in its own preferred fashion and watch for responses that differ for different brokers. Surfshark belongs to a consortium that’s working on a standardized protocol for such requests, called the Data Rights Protocol. Other group contributors include MIT, Consumer Reports, and the data broker Spokeo. We’ll see what comes of this initiative.
Patience With Incogni
As noted, the process of getting your data removed can be slow. After installing the products, asking my questions, and writing most of this review, I put Incogni aside and worked on other projects.
A week later I checked back in and found that the score had reached nine removals Completed and one Rejected. As noted, Rejected simply means that the broker responded stating it didn’t have my personal information. Given that brokers legally can take 30 to 45 days to respond, it’s not surprising to see that 48 of the requests remain in progress. You need patience with Incogni, and with every similar service.
Does What It Says
That’s it for Incogni. It acts as your proxy, sending data removal requests without knowing whether brokers actually have your data. It then reports their responses without actively validating that your data was removed. To be fair, there are massive fines for mishandling such requests under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), enough to discourage any chicanery. But I really like the opportunity to empirically confirm removal, meaning I can see that my data was present, and I can see that it isn’t anymore.
Signing up with Incogni won’t get you de-listed from the likes of PeopleFinder or WhitePages. At present, it doesn’t work with people search sites, though the company plans to expand in this area. Conversely, Abine DeleteMe, IDX Privacy, and The Kanary focus strongly on people search sites. If you really want to bow out of having your data aggregated and sold, you might consider subscribing both to Incogni and to one of these other services.
