When you picture an identity thief, do you think of a basement hacker distributing malware and reaching out through the internet to steal personal information? That’s a possible scenario, but it’s just as likely your privacy could be threatened by information you’ve given away yourself. If you own a home, that’s a matter of public record. Merchants you deal with know where you live. They also have your email address and other information. Data aggregator websites pull together all this information to create a profile that’s just as revealing as what a hacker might acquire. The big difference is that you can say no to the aggregators. The Kanary is a service that combs these sites for your personal information and automates telling them to leave you alone. It seems to do the job, but it does also flag some sites that really aren’t data aggregators.
What Does The Kanary Cost?
Dealing with data aggregators is a pain, even for a company that makes a business of it. The Kanary doesn’t work for birdseed. A subscription to protect your own personal data lists at $89.99 per year. You can extend that to six family members for $129.99 per year. Monthly subscriptions, at $9.99 and $14.99 per month, are also available.
Abine’s DeleteMe is probably the best-known service in this realm. DeleteMe promises to automate deletion of your data where possible and to handle the task with human agents when necessary. That personal touch comes at a price—DeleteMe costs $129 per year for an individual. You can protect two people for $229 per year, or a family of four for a $329 subscription.
You pay $79.95 per year for an IDX Privacy subscription, which gets you a full suite of privacy-enhancing features. It does its best to automate opt-outs from aggregator sites, but also monitors the Dark Web in case your personal info appears there. It aims to prevent or at least remediate identity theft. And it even includes a full-featured VPN (Virtual Private Network).
There aren’t a lot of products in this area. The Kanary is squarely in the middle, price-wise.
Free Scan With The Kanary
Anybody can get a free scan from The Kanary. All you need to do is enter your email address. The scan page does warn that results could take up to 24 hours, and it notes that you’ll get an email when results are ready. I tested it with my work email, an address that I’ve had ever since email became widely available.
I found that The Kanary also sent an email to confirm the start of the scan. Following a link in this email, I determined that the free scan checks 32 common sites such as People Finder Free, Spokeo, and That’s Them. Paying for membership extends that search to over 100 additional aggregators. Of course, if you want to do anything about personal data found by the free scan, you must sign up for a paid subscription.
The next morning my results came in. The Kanary found… nothing at all. If I were a random consumer, just giving this service a try, I probably would have given up on it right there. I’m not sure why The Kanary only checks a limited subset of its tracked sites. Wouldn’t it be better to show trial users your best scanning skills?
The Kanary Membership
I proceeded to sign up for a full membership in the service. As part of the process, I filled in additional personal information: email addresses, phone numbers, names, addresses, usernames, and my birth year. You have 24 hours to confirm all email addresses and phone numbers by clicking a link in an email or text message. If you want to add an old or inactive phone number or email address, you must work with tech support, since you won’t be able to confirm.
Once you finish and submit your personal information, The Kanary starts a full scan, which it says can take 24 to 48 hours to finish. If you do nothing more, it automatically repeats the scan every 30 days. That’s important, because data brokers are likely to pick up your data again even after you’ve had it removed.
On the Account page you can set up multi-factor authentication. That’s a good idea, given that you’ll be putting lots of personal information into The Kanary. It uses the typical authentication via smartphone app (Google Authenticator or any of the many work-alike apps).
What The Kanary Saw
Once again, I got results overnight. I was a bit put off by a misspelling in the email, which stated, “We discoverd your information on new sites.” I clicked to log into The Kanary’s online dashboard. At the top, it noted that nine found items needed my attention. It also reported 16 items slated for removal and two that I chose to ignore. That last figure seemed odd, as I had never seen this information before.
One of the automatically ignored pages was my author page at Amazon. I certainly wouldn’t want that removed! The other was an author page pointing at my PCMag articles from a tech news site. I left both of those on the ignore list.
Stepping through the remaining nine items identified as needing attention, I found a truly peculiar mix.
- My Twitter account;
- My LinkedIn account;
- My author page on PCMag’s website;
- Two merchant Facebook pages where I’d made a comment;
- A press release about one of my PCMag articles;
- A link on Medium to one of my articles;
- A real-estate data aggregator;
- And an email data aggregator called RocketReach.
Out of all these, only the last two were appropriate targets for removal. I certainly would not want The Kanary trying to remove my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts! To be fair, it did present all these items as needing attention, so I could decide what to save and what to remove. But users of this service need to pay attention and not just blindly click Confirm Removal.
I asked my contact at the company about these results. She explained that some people use the service as “a way to close old or inactive accounts.” She also noted that aggregators often scrape contact data from social sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn but did concede that they’re working to make things clearer and avoid confusing users. My thought is that any efforts to close old accounts or highlight social media accounts that might be scraped should be a separate list from data aggregator sites needing removal of information.
Slated for Removal
Finally, I moved on to the meat of the service, the list of items The Kanary is removing. This list held 16 items, some of them apparent duplicates. Every single item correctly identified an actual data aggregator holding my personal data.
Clicking an item brought up a detail page with information about how long the removal had been in progress and how long it usually takes with the aggregator in question. On the Snapshot page for every item, The Kanary reported no snapshot available, offering instead a link to the content it found. I expected those links to display my data on the site, but many of them just went to the aggregator’s general search page, or to a “no results” page.
I asked my company contact about the absent snapshots. She explained that normally the service would provide an image of the found data, so users don’t have to visit a possibly untrusted site. “We’re working on updating our storage approach for these images,” she said, “so many newer results will have that snapshot missing.” I like the idea of seeing what was found without visiting the site. This feature should be working again in a week or two.
I wanted to see more results, so I dug in and added more personal details, specifically a few more email addresses and an former physical address that I occupied for over 20 years. After the expected overnight wait, I had another collection of items needing attention and more items slated for removal. As before, the items needing attention were a mixed bag, including several author bio pages, a Yelp entry for me as a (non-existent) business, and four actual aggregators.
The list of sites with pending removal requests grew to over 30, just as I had hoped.
Checking Out the Competition
A number of things about The Kanary combined to lower my confidence in the service. Yes, I’m a pedant, but sending out emails with obvious typos in the large-print heading is a negative. I didn’t like seeing so many perfectly valid pages proposed for possible removal. Who would want to remove their Twitter or LinkedIn accounts? Likewise, the many pages on author-lookup sites listing my articles and my public email address are at least harmless.
When The Kanary does list what it’s removing, the presentation is a bit confusing. In my case, it showed 34 distinct items up for removal, but many of the aggregator sites appeared more than once. In fact, there were just 18 distinct aggregators involved. I can report that after about two weeks a third of the personal data instances were cleared; the others understandably remained in progress.
I much prefer the presentation in the regular reports from DeleteMe. The report starts with a summary and some statistics, then goes on to multiple pages of findings in the form of data cards. It lists every aggregator that DeleteMe tracks (about 40 at present) and marks each as clear of personal data or “Removal in Progress.” For the latter, it flags what types of personal data were found. Each card includes the typical removal time for the aggregator in question.
IDX Privacy is a whole suite of privacy-related features and services. Among those features are a full-fledged VPN, a Dark Web monitoring system, social media takeover tracking, and a million-dollar insurance fund to offset any identity theft expenses. The component that parallels The Kanary is called Forget Me Personal Data Removal. As with The Kanary, you start by entering your name, address, birth date, and other personal data. Unlike The Kanary, IDX Privacy returns its findings very quickly. Naturally, the actual removal process can take days or weeks.
Personal data removal with IDX Privacy is fully automated. Unlike Abine DeleteMe, the company doesn’t use human agents. In testing, I found that all the found personal data appeared on actual aggregator sites, among them freepeopledirectory.com, phonebooks.com, and verifyarrestwarrant.com. It didn’t make any attempt to remove edge cases like my Twitter account, Amazon author page, or author bio pages the way The Kanary did.
In case it isn’t clear, none of these three products attempt to actively prevent data brokers from gathering information about you. They really can’t do that because gathering and aggregating publicly available data is not illegal. Products like Avast AntiTrack and Norton AntiTrack take a different approach. They install in your browser and prevent tracking, both traditional cookie-based tracking and modern browser fingerprinting. There’s no reason you couldn’t employ both kinds of privacy protection if you so desire.
Does the Job But Could Use More Polish
The Kanary can certainly find and remove your personal information from data aggregator websites. The product could be improved by separating that function from other tasks such as identifying old accounts and flagging accounts that might be scraped to capture your personal data. If those secondary tasks got their own separate location, and if the listing of found data gained focus by putting together the different reports on the same aggregator, it would be much easier to see the benefits.
The field of products that automate clearing your personal info from data broker sites is small. You can pay a bit less than The Kanary and get IDX Privacy’s full suite of privacy tools. You can pay a good bit more for Abine DeleteMe and its very focused, very clear removal service. In the broader field of privacy services and products in general, we’ve named Abine Blur Premium our Editors’ Choice. It doesn’t duplicate the work of Abine DeleteMe, but it provides privacy protection in many different ways. Among these are the ability to shop online while masking your email address, credit card number, and phone, active blocking of online trackers, and a full-blown password manager.
