Incogni Review
Still the best data removal service on the market?
Cybercrime rates continue to climb and the so-called surveillance economy is thriving. The need for data-removal services is becoming painfully obvious. Is Incogni still up to the task? Join us as we dive in to find out.
Summary: Is Incogni worth considering?
Yes, if you’re looking for ways to reduce your digital footprint, then Incogni might just be for you.
Standout features:
- Covers a broad range of data brokers, including those that few other services are willing to touch.
- Covers 190+ data brokers at the time of writing, with more being added all the time.
- Represents the best cost-per-broker value, doubly so, considering its broad-spectrum coverage.
- Offers a hands-off approach by default but provides powerful dashboards for users who wish to monitor the process.
- Collects only the bare minimum of personal information from customers.
- Protects customer data in line with General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) guidelines.
- Allows users to add up to 3 emails, phone numbers (for US residents), and addresses to identify and remove more records.
- Offers a Family & Friends plan for up to 4 additional people on one account.
- Backed by Surfshark. Data privacy is baked into Incogni’s DNA.
Friction points:
- Support is responsive, but limited to email only.
- The number of data brokers covered can sometimes go down as well as up.
- Sometimes requires user intervention (a trade-off for collecting minimal personal data).
- Only US customers can add additional phone numbers at the time of writing.
What can Incogni do for you?
Incogni is a personal information removal service, also commonly known as a data removal service. It takes the considerable time and effort involved in opting out of data brokers by hand out of the equation.
Data removal services do what individuals wouldn’t practically be able to do for themselves: they approach data brokers and submit data-removal requests, en masse. This might not sound like much, but doing it yourself could take hundreds of hours, several times a year. More on this soon.
Ultimately, what Incogni can do for you is reduce the amount of spam and scam messages reaching your inboxes, thwart identity thieves trying to gather data on you in easy mode (by buying ready-made profiles from data brokers), and even potentially save you money by reducing loan refusals and insurance-premium hikes.
What are data brokers?
Data brokers are companies that specialize in sourcing, collecting, processing, and monetizing people’s personal data. They scour public records, social media profiles and posts, and any other legally available sources they can get their hands on to build detailed profiles on everyday people. Data brokers will also often share, trade, or sell people’s personal data among themselves.
“Personal data” here can mean everything from basic contact details to financial information, court records, property records, various preferences, even sexual orientation. Data brokers have many customers, from that creepy person who saw your nametag in line at the coffee shop to insurance companies looking to “fine tune” their premiums.
Many data brokers focus on business-to-business (B2B) sales, selling data to advertisers and sometimes even law enforcement agencies (who would otherwise need a warrant or subpoena to access that same information). Others, though, deal directly to the public through websites known as people search sites or people finder sites.
It’s these data brokers—people search sites—that have fully searchable, public-facing databases positioned effectively on popular search engines like Alphabet Inc.’s Google Search. These are the easiest data brokers to discover (just do a web search for your name, address, or phone number) and have every incentive to show you (or at least hint at) exactly what data they have on you or anybody else.
B2B data brokers, on the other hand, tend to work behind the scenes, dealing directly with other organizations. These data brokers generally don’t have public-facing databases and have no business interest in showing the general public what they have on whom. They’re bound by the same state-level data-privacy laws as people search sites, but confirming whether or not they’ve complied with data removal requests is more difficult.
How does Incogni work?
Incogni’s approach is simple: it does what you can do yourself, but far more efficiently and at a far greater scale than any one person could reasonably expect to manage. Incogni submits opt-out requests (data-removal requests) to each data broker—including people search sites—according to each broker’s particular requirements.
Data brokers have to adhere to the law, but what little data-privacy legislation we have in place allows for significant variance in opt-out procedures. Sometimes, it’s a simple, easy-to-find online form that you have to fill in. Other times, it’s an email they want you to send or even a printed-out form via postal mail. Opting out from a data broker can take 5 minutes or 45 minutes, and they might process your request in minutes or over several weeks.
Just finding those data brokers most likely to hold your data is a mammoth task. Again, people search sites are data brokers on easy mode. Finding the more shadowy, B2B brokers is much more of a challenge. Adding to this difficulty is the fact that requesting data removal once isn’t always enough—to ensure permanent data removal, requests have to be periodically re-sent, time and time again, several times a year.
What’s it like to use Incogni day-to-day?
“Using Incogni day-to-day” might be a bit of a misnomer. Services like this tend to be more of a set-and-forget affair, and Incogni is no exception. In fact, the whole point of a service like this is to take the effort involved in keeping your personal information private off your plate. Using Incogni, for many customers, means not thinking about Incogni or data brokers at all.
That said, some users enjoy seeing the progress that’s being made from week to week, or simply keeping their data-removal service honest, and Incogni has those users covered as well, with a detailed and intuitive dashboard and regular, easy-to-follow progress reports. But let’s start with the onboarding process.
Signing up
Signing up to Incogni could not be simpler: only the bare minimum of personal data is required at sign-up, and apart from a form granting Incogni the ability to act on your behalf, there are no formalities to work through.
Plans and pricing
Incogni offers both an individual plan and a Family & Friends plan (that allows for up to 4 additional people on the same account). Customers have the option of paying monthly or opting for an annual plan for 50% off the monthly subscription. Here’s how the numbers look:
| Individual Plan | Family & Friends Plan | |
| Billed monthly | $14.98 /mo | $32.98 /mo |
| Billed annually | $7.49 /mo (billed as $89.88 yearly) | $16.49 /mo (billed as $197.88 yearly) |
Dashboards and reports
Once logged in, Incogni users can view a personal dashboard that shows the number of removal requests that have been sent, are in progress, and have been completed. A graph shows users how these three values have changed over time, providing a satisfying overview of the progress Incogni has been making in removing the user’s personal data.
Given that Incogni periodically re-sends data-removal requests, this graph doesn’t stop evolving as long as your subscription remains active.
The same dashboard also shows users how much time they’ve saved with Incogni (compared to going the DIY route and tracking down and opting out of data brokers manually) as well as a running total of suppression list entries. Many data brokers use suppression lists to make sure that any personal data associated with a profile that has been removed won’t be added again (from their ongoing scraping and acquisition operations).
Finally, there’s an activity log that shows the latest events (like completed removal requests) and the dates on which they took place. This can be expanded into a full log.
Other than the dashboard, users also have a “detailed view” tab in which they can find a wealth of information on some of the data brokers covered by Incogni.
This tab also displays compliance and severity ratings for each listed data broker, as well as information about sent requests and the status of the latest request. The “compliance score” is a rating that’s associated with how quickly and reliably each data broker complies with removal requests. The “data severity” rating is based on the level of sensitivity and associated risks of the information held by the data broker.
Clicking on a row in this view expands the information displayed on the given data broker. This is for the people who really want to take a deep dive into what’s happening in the background and who want to learn more about the data brokers that, until recently, had and were dealing in their personal data.
Here, you can see a more detailed status for the latest request sent, including whether it’s overdue if it’s still “in progress.” There’s some more detailed information on the data broker (including its average request resolution time) and a set of risks associated with it. These risks can range from “targeted advertising” to “identity theft” and depend on the data broker’s history, the kinds of data it holds, and other factors.
Customer support
Incogni offers email support exclusively, but its customer support representatives respond within 24 hours. Although some reviewers state that they’d like to see additional ways to contact support, email seems like a rational choice if there’s to be only one method. This is, after all, a “set and forget” type of service that just chugs along in the background.
You can reach Incogni support at support@incogni.com
How Incogni compares to the competition
The easiest way to compare data-removal services is to look at the number of data brokers covered and the associated cost. We’ve even calculated a “value” metric that does just that: it provides a “cost-per-data-broker” figure. But this kind of metric really only tells a small part of the story. One Reddit user even made their own, impressively detailed comparison table, covering even more competitors than we have the space to discuss here.
Equally important is the types of data brokers a removal service covers. Most data-removal services focus on people search sites. It’s easy to check if this type of data broker holds a user’s information-and therefore easy to confirm if they’ve complied with removal requests. However, focusing exclusively on one type of data broker leaves the data-removal process half-done at best.
There are at least 4 other types of data brokers in play, though, and removing data from those types brings benefits and protections that removing it from only people search sites (PSS) can’t. More on this below.
Data brokers covered
Let’s start by looking at the metric many people who are shopping around for a data removal service are likely to pay attention to first: the total number of data brokers covered on a basic plan.
| Data removal service | Number of data brokers covered on basic plan |
| Incogni | 190 |
| Kanary | 210 |
| OneRep | 207 |
| DeleteMe | 75 |
| Optery | 80 |
So we see that Incogni is competitive with (and even slightly outclassed by) Kanary and OneRep when it comes to the total number of data brokers covered. These numbers tend to change a lot over time, so we can safely ignore small differences. It’s clear, though, that both DeleteMe and Optery lag behind the competition (at the time of writing).
Some data removal services also effectively inflate their numbers by listing custom removals among their covered data brokers and/or listing multiple domains controlled by a single data broker. This is especially common with people search sites. Some companies will count “peoplestalk.com,” “stalkpeople.com,” and “peoplestalk.biz” as three data brokers, while Incogni tries to group such domains together to avoid overcounting.
Let’s drill down into the details and see what else these numbers don’t tell us.
Types of data brokers covered
There are six main types of data brokers in play when it comes to data-removal services:
- Marketing data brokers: Harvest information regarding your browsing habits, past purchases, interests, and more. They’re responsible for targeted ads and other targeted marketing activities.
- Recruitment data brokers: Compile and use personal information to offer background screening services to recruiters and HR managers. A concerning background report—even if inaccurate—can cost you job offers.
- Risk-mitigation brokers: Deal in a variety of background, criminal, property, and other types of information to provide reports to various investment companies and other businesses.
- Financial-information brokers: Trade in various financial and background information for credit companies and banks to establish your credit score. They can affect your loan eligibility and ability to get lines of credit in general.
- Health-information data brokers: Collect information about your health and sell it to companies broadly in the healthcare field. This information can be used to target you with health-related product ads and even set your insurance premiums.
- People search sites: Very public-facing companies that collect vast profiles on those caught up in their data-scraping and harvesting operations. They usually offer free-but-limited access to the personal information they hold, with the option to buy full profiles for as little as $1. This is the only type of data broker that appears prominently in search-engine results pages.
This is how Incogni looks compared to the competition:
| Data-removal service | No. of data-broker types covered on basic plan | Types of data brokers covered on basic plan |
| Incogni | 4 | MarketingRecruitmentRisk mitigationPSS |
| Kanary | 4 | MarketingRecruitmentFinancialPSS |
| OneRep | 1 | PSS |
| DeleteMe | 1 | PSS |
| Optery | 2 | MarketingPSS |
As you can see, Incogni is tied with Kanary when it comes to the number of different data-broker types covered on a basic plan. All 5 data-removal services cover PSS, but for some, it’s the only data broker type they cover.
Incogni (at the time of writing) covers 46 PSS with the remainder of its 173 data brokers coming from a mix of the remaining categories. This represents a broad-spectrum approach that deals with not only the most visible data brokers—people search sites—but also those that stick to the shadows, staying out of the public eye.
Value metrics
With the above in mind, we can still get a rough idea of the value each data-removal service represents. The simplest way to put a number to this value is to divide the lowest monthly cost by the number of data brokers from which the service removes data. This doesn’t capture the importance of covering multiple types of data brokers, but it’s still something.
Here’s how our “value” metric plays out across the competition:
| Data-removal service | Value*, in USD per data broker |
| Incogni | 0.04 |
| Kanary | 0.07 |
| OneRep | 0.05 |
| DeleteMe | 0.11 |
| Optery | 0.04 |
*Lowest monthly cost divided by the number of data brokers covered by the basic plan.
Incogni is tied with Optery on this metric. The only other competitor that even comes close is OneRep, but given that it covers PSS exclusively, we can safely ignore it. Optery, though, certainly comes close to matching Incogni. We believe Incogni’s particular mix of data-broker types leads to more effective data removal.
Additional features
There are some additional features that are often mentioned in reviews of services like Incogni’s. Here’s a rundown of the main ones:
- Before-and-after screenshots of removals: Relatively easy to do for PSS, essentially impossible for other data-broker types. Only services that focus exclusively on PSS can offer this feature for all removals. Incogni relies on data-privacy legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Directive (GDPR) to ensure that data is truly deleted. Incogni has proven itself willing and able to take non-compliant companies to task, legally.
- Free trial: Incogni doesn’t currently offer a free trial, but it does offer a 30-day, money-back guarantee. Free trials typically only last 7 – 14 days, which isn’t likely to be enough time to judge the effectiveness of a removal service. Depending on local laws, data brokers have 30 – 45 days to respond to removal requests, so we believe that 30 days is more appropriate.
- Multiple data points for removal: Incogni gives users the option of adding up to three email addresses and three street addresses to help accurately identify and remove even more profiles on data brokers’ databases. US residents also have the option to have up to three phone numbers used to track down their profiles.
- Mobile app: Incogni doesn’t currently have a mobile app for users to download. This hasn’t been a problem in our testing, given that the Incogni user portal and dashboard is optimized for both desktop and mobile web browsers. We found this to be more than enough for checking up on Incogni’s progress every now and then.
- Regions covered: Kanary and Optery are both US-only services, while DeleteMe covers 6 European Union (EU) countries plus the US, Canada, the UK, Brazil, and Singapore. Incogni covers 27 EU countries, the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Man.
Verdict
With the addition of new features like the Family & Friends plan and multiple data-point removal, Incogni is effectively defending its market-leading position. We’ve found, though, that it’s the core of Incogni’s service that really sets it apart from the competition.
With removal from a total of 173 data brokers, including 46 people search sites and a mix of marketing, recruitment and risk-mitigation brokers, Incogni offers a robust, broad-spectrum approach to data removal.
Other than signing up (a three-step process that includes filling in a simple authorization form), Incogni’s service is essentially hands-free. For those who like to keep track of progress and learn more about what’s happening in the background, Incogni offers a detailed dashboard and regular progress reports.
In an industry in which some players have ties to the data brokers they claim to work against, Incogni’s pedigree as a Surfshark initiative is comforting to say the least. Incogni represents excellent value for money, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and market-leading effectiveness.
Still the best data-removal service on the market? We think so. Try it for yourself and see what you think.
