Incogni review: easy way to remove your data from the Internet

Like it or not, the Internet is littered with your personal information. Every time you accept cookies, download an app or even do a task as simple as visiting a website, data brokers harvest your name, address, and phone number, potentially selling it to interested third parties.

Your collected personal data can then be used for sending you spam emails, telemarketing calls, and targeted ads. Scammers or identity thieves can also potentially make use of it. Therefore, you might be interested in removing this information entirely.

You can request this data to be removed all by yourself. But that requires effort and time. Besides, most data brokers don’t want to remove any of your information.

Fortunately, Surfshark has recognized the issue and came up with Incogni, a data privacy tool that requests your data removal from several brokers on your behalf.

Incogni ensures your privacy and saves time by dealing with the companies collecting your data and demanding its removal. Simply put, you get a big red button that flushes your personal information and enforces existing data privacy laws without you having to contact anyone yourself.

Visit Incogni

Setting up Incogni

The Incogni setup process is incredibly simple. You just have to sign up with your email address, create a password, and the Authorization form to give Incogni rights to request data removal from data brokers on your behalf. Once that’s out of the way, you’ll be requested to fill in some more information, which will help to identify which records belong to you. Later on, you'll be presented with a screen showing how many data brokers Incogni currently has on its list, ready to be contacted.

At the time of writing this, the number is 180+, but Incogni reassured us that this number will increase regularly.

After confirming all the details, you're going to be forwarded to a simple dashboard that shows the current status of your data.

Incogni uses an internal algorithm to decide which companies are likely to have your information, and reaches out to them automatically.

Incogni’s interface is completely minimalistic. On top of this dashboard, you’re only getting an additional “Detailed view” page, which shows the specific data brokers, main information about them, your data sensitivity, and the current status of your data.

And that’s it – Incogni makes this process as simple and straightforward as possible. Moments after signing, Incogni started dealing with my data immediately.

How does Incogni work?

Incogni asks for minimal amount of your personal data so that the agents can conduct data removal requests. It holds a consistently-increasing backlog of some of the world’s biggest data brokers and sends removal requests to the companies that are likely to have your information. Recently, Incogni also started removing data from around 66 people's search sites in the US.

So, how does it know where your information might be? In the registration process, the platform collects some of the key details about you (such as full name, phone number, email, birth date, and location). So, the algorithm may not send out requests, if, for example, a certain data broker doesn’t collect information about the people in your area.

Incogni agents search the internet for your personal data and use GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA privacy laws to enforce data brokers to delete your information. Only when the Incogni agents receive a written confirmation do they mark your request as completed.

You can find the statuses of your request and whether they have been completed by going to the “Detailed view” section on the Incogni page to see the data broker responses.

The information about your data will be marked as follows:

• “Completed”, if the company reported that the information has been removed or was never held.
• “In Progress”, if the process is underway.
• “Rejected”, if the data broker refused to delete the data. Once the data broker explicitly denies processing the request, Incogni continues contacting to ensure your data is removed. If needed, data protection agencies are contacted in order to understand what is the reason for refusal and if possible find ways to change their decision.
• “Not started”, if the data removal process is, well – not started.

Incogni also gives a general description of what data each broker collects and where it is used: I’ve found several companies collecting my name, phone, address, employment history, credit data, and more for financial, insurance, recruitment, or advertising purposes.

The sensitivity of data collected by these brokers is measured in coloured categories and scores – the lower meaning not very sensitive, 10 our of 10 points being the most sensitive.

According to Incogni, the higher ratings are quite rare and would constitute sensitive information such as Social Security numbers or credit card information. So all in all, it's useful to have an overall view and data sensitivity score on each of the requests, as it helps to have a visual idea of your data being used online.

Getting data removed with Incogni

A very easy signup process and a very simple dashboard hide a pretty elaborate data removal process – which was as simple as it gets. Incogni will send such emails to the brokers, including your main information, asking for all traces of data connected to it to be removed.

As per the rights, data brokers are given a window of time to respond – so, this process won’t be instantaneous.

After a couple of weeks, 8 data brokers have already deleted all of my data, as notified by my Incogni dashboard.

I haven’t received any emails from data brokers trying to bypass Incogni’s measures or asking me to complete additional actions. Everything from Incogni’s end was completely sorted out.

However, Incogni points out that there might be cases where a data broken might try and reach you directly. If the recipients of your email include [email protected], you don’t need to do anything, and if not – just forward the letter to them and let them take care of the rest for you.

All in all, removing my data with Surfshark Incogni was a quick and easy process.

Surfshark Incogni pricing

As of now, Incogni itself offers only one plan – you can purchase it monthly or by signing up for a yearly subscription. Incogni costs $6.49/month on a 1-year plan, or $12.99/month. That is lower than most similar privacy assurance services.

However, the situation gets even better knowing that there's another exclusive option – you can get a Surfshark One+ bundle starting from $5.99/month and have an all-in-one cyber security solution. The Surfshark One bundle includes Incogni, a robust antivirus, a market-leading VPN, an ad blocker, and even more security tools.

You may be wondering: which option to choose? And why would you even need to choose a yearly subscription?

Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to simply sign up for a month or two of Incogni, get your personal data removed, and ride off into the sunset. However, there’s one thing to consider.

Our data collection is constant and consistent. In time, your information might, and probably will, make its way to databases of new data brokers, meaning that the process of removing your data will have to begin from the start once more. Additionally, Incogni will also include new companies in its database for an even wider personal data search. If you really want your information to get wiped out, you need to do consistent checks and keep on enforcing your rights as an individual.

And if you have questions about the Surfshark One+ bundle, the answer is pretty similar– after a month of use, cyber threats don't just run away. In fact, with the technology improving, cybercriminals are keeping up with that too. Hence, an all-around protection suite is rather necessary these days.

This is why getting a yearly subscription makes sense – Incogni will keep on contacting companies on your behalf and making sure your information is as scarce on the internet as possible at all times.

For under $80 a year, that’s a pretty good deal.

Start using Incogni today

Is Incogni worth getting?

Incogni is a very simple tool to use – and your experiences with it will vary, depending on the expectations. I like to see it as your personal assistant, giving leverage against massive data broker companies.

In addition, Incogni keeps improving with time. Recently it has launched a feature dedicated to American users – an option to be de-listed from “people search”.

However, there’s still where to improve, like making it available to add multiple emails on one account, and family plans. But even as it is right now, Incogni is an excellent simple tool for making sure your data isn’t sold to the highest bidder.

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