For anyone who has been on the internet for a long time, spam emails, WhatsApp messages and even spam calls are a fact of life. Our personal data is used by hundreds of different marking and advertising companies, all facilitated by data brokers whose entire business model revolves around harvesting and selling your data.
There’s nothing stopping you reaching out to these companies to ask them to remove your data. It’s entirely free to do this, and you can even have your personal details added to a company’s suppression list to ensure that they won’t use your data again. The issue here is that you first need to know who to contact, and then you need to email each broker individually to request your data be removed.
If only there was a better way! That’s where Incogni from comes in. Incogni has been developed by one of the best VPN services, Surfshark, and is an automated data broker removal tool that does all the legwork for you. After you sign up and provide details of the data you want removed such as your name, home address and email addresses, Incogni will automatically file a removal request on your behalf, requesting the brokers remove your data from their records. Then you just need to sit back and wait for the confirmations to come in.
Just remember that while many brokers will action your request the same day they receive it, others may take a lot longer.
How much does Incogni cost?
Incogni offers both an individual and a family & friends plan, each available as a monthly or annual subscription. The individual plan will cost $14.98 per month, but is discounted by 50% to $89.88 if you’re willing and able to pay for a full year in one go. This works out at an effective $7.49 per month.
Family & friends allows you to share Incogni with up to four other people, enough for a small family to control their data online. This plan will cost $32.98 a month (or equivalent currency) if you pay monthly, or is cut by 50% to $197.88 if you pick the annual plan. That works out at $16.49 per month.
It would be remiss of me not to clearly outline that signing up to Surfshark's One+ plan includes Incogni alongside tons of other bells and whistles, and it's cheaper. If you're sure you want Incogni, just buy Surfshark One+, even if you won't ever use the VPN.
There is, however, another way to get Incogni, which is by signing up for a Surfshark VPN subscription. If you choose the One+ plan, this includes not only a suite of privacy and security related tools including the VPN, antivirus, ad blocking, real-time data breach alerts and more, but it also bundles in access to Incogni.
There’s a number of different subscription options here but if you want Incogni as well as the VPN then it will cost $17.95 for a monthly subscription, $91.35 for an annual subscription (equivalent to $6.09 per month, including the three "free" months applied) or $115.83 for a two-year plan (equivalent to $4.29 per month, including the three "free" months applied). There are other cheaper tiers available, but the One+ tier is the only one that comes with Incogni included.
On the one-year plan, Incogni alone is marginally cheaper, but only by a couple of dollars per year. It makes sense to get a ton of extra features alongside Incogni for a very minimal extra outlay. The two-year Surfshark One+ plan is the best-value way of getting Incogni, as it drops the equivalent yearly price to around $63 – and you get a top-quality VPN alongside it.
Incogni’s pricing stands up well against its competitors. DeleteMe’s single-person plan will cost you $129 per year, and Onerep’s monthly subscription works out to just shy of $100 per year. There’s also Optery which offers a frankly rather befuddling set of different monthly and yearly subscription plans, and while its “core” plan may be cheaper than Incogni, it’s also the most limited option and doesn’t allow you to change your name like Incogni does.
None of these rivals are anywhere near close to how much you could get Incogni for if you sign up for the Surfshark One+ subscription, so we think its pricing is some of the best around.
What does Incogni do?
All this might sound great, but there’s one important question that still remains to be answered – what exactly is a data removal service, and why would you want one?
Selling people’s personal data is a lucrative business, and the more companies know about you, the more money they can make. Data removal services such as Incogni and others help to automate the process of removing your personal data.
As you browse the web and enter your personal details into various websites, there are companies that come along and scrape all that data. Data brokers gather up as much information as they can about you from all around the web, package it up and sell it on to advertisers, marketing companies and, unfortunately, sometimes less scrupulous folks looking to try and steal identities.
Incogni offers data removal services for 190 different brokers. Now that’s not as many as some, with Privacy Bee offering removal services for over 400 different data brokers at last count, but it’s also more than a lot of its rivals, and for less money than many.
As well as data brokers, you have people search/people finder sites. These sites exist to collect and sell information about people and are used by folks who might want to investigate a potential neighbor or roommate, or to check out what someone they used to know from school is doing these days. You have the same problem here as you do with data brokers, in that there is nothing stopping malicious actors using these sites to gather information on potential marks.
It should be noted that removing your data isn’t an instant thing. Once you submit your removal request it takes time for companies to complete the request. In the UK and EU companies have a month to respond to a data removal request while in California they have 45 days, which can be increased to 90 if the company notifies you that they need more time.
What's Incogni like to use?
Getting started with Incogni is a refreshingly straight-forward affair. After signing up you’ll be invited to add your personal details. You need to give Incogni your name, surname, email address (up to three different ones), home address (up to three) and your date of birth, though this last one isn’t required.
Once you’ve done this, you need to sign the authorization form, which states that you are allowing Incogni to act on your behalf to request the removal of your data. You can either type a signature, or scribble something manually with your mouse/finger. Once you submit the form, that’s it! No other steps are required. Incogni runs off in the background to send all the removal requests automatically and the dashboard will update as the requests are processes by the brokers. You may also get emails from some of the brokers as well, confirming that they’ve honored the request.
Where Incogni could do better is in communicating the finer details of how its product functions. While it does have both a blog and a knowledge base, this proved frustratingly difficult to find answers to what should have been simple questions due to the way data is presented to customers.
Recently, Incogni released a long-requested update that allows you to add more than one email address on your account, but this new feature is not mentioned anywhere on the Incogni blog or on the knowledgebase. According to Incogni support, emails are sent out with new feature requests, but how is a potential new customer supposed to find these announcements? The company does have a YouTube channel, but it doesn’t look like any new product announcements are posted there, and while they do have a feed over on X, this is only viewable by those with an account for that platform.
There’s also a lack of clarity about how often data broker removal requests are sent, or how quickly a change in your details will take effect. In the FAQ there’s a brief mention that requests will be sent "every few months," but exactly how often it that?
Requests in the detailed view dashboard are given a Severity, which is either low, medium or high, and appears to be determined by the associated risks based on the types of information that broker collects. However, when it comes to requests flagged as either low or medium, the associated risks seem exactly the same. So what’s the difference between these brokers?
For example, we can have two brokers, both of which have an identical list of associated risks, but one broker is listed as medium and the other as low. There’s also no information in the Incogni knowledgebase about how Severity is calculated. There is a post on the Incogni blog, which is a completely separate site from the knowledgebase, that talks about "data sensitivity," but it’s unclear if this is the same thing as "severity."
While Incogni does exactly what it says on the tin at a high level, in that it provides a simple way to request the deletion of your personal data, it can be a frustratingly opaque experience when you start looking for more explanation or try to delve into the nitty-gritty of exactly how it functions.
How private is Incogni?
Even though it’s owned by Surfshark, Incogni has its own stand-alone privacy policy, which is pretty solid as far as these kind of things go. It's completely up-front about sharing data with folks such as Google Analytics and Mailchimp to help it deliver its services, but it’s clear that it doesn’t sell your personal data to anyone.
It has fewer partners compared to many of its competitors, and it's also nice to see it lay out specific timespans for how long it retains different sorts of data. This is refreshing when compared to other privacy policies which use a wishy-washy "we will retain your data for as long as is necessary" phrase instead.
It’s to-the-point, nicely detailed and doesn’t rely on too much legal or technical jargon, and that's exactly what we'd expect, having been developed by Surfshark, a company that has built its foundations on protecting peoples' privacy.
Final verdict
While some of Incogni’s competitors might offer more features, and others might remove your details from more data brokers, Incogni offers the best combination of price, functionality and ease-of-use. There's a slight lack of explantion when it comes to product features, and a support site that lacks real detail, but if you’re looking for is a fire-and-forget data removal solution that won’t break the bank and genuinely values your privacy, Incogni is a great choice.
Consider if:
1. You don’t want to contact all the different data brokers yourself and would rather someone else did the work.
2. You’re looking for an easy-to-use data removal tool
3. You’re looking for a data removal tool that doesn’t cost the earth.
Avoid if:
1. You live outside of the EU/UK/USA/Canada as Incogni only works in these territories. You can find a full list of supported countries at this link.
2. You want to remove your data from more brokers than Incogni offers.
3. You want live chat support. All contact with Incogni is through email.
Incogni alternatives
Incogni is an excellent personal data removal service, and essentially comes free with the best cheap VPN. However, there are some good alternatives out there, too:
- Kanary: While only available in the US, Kanary offers similar functionality to Incogni with very few bells and whistles. It differentiates itself from its competitors by offering a custom domain and email address to annual subscribers
- Aura: Aura bills itself as an “all-in-one protection” solution, including VPN, identity theft protection and what it calls its privacy assistant, which allows you to request the removal of your personal details from people search sites and spam lists.
- Optery: While it’s more expensive than Incogni, it covers nearly twice as many data brokers, and even offers support for requesting the removal of outdated data from Google searches.
