Incogni is a highly capable data broker removal tool created by Surfshark. In a nutshell, Incogni sends out information removal requests on your behalf to a long list of data brokers, forcing those who are holding your personal information to delete it without delay.
Data brokers are entities that collect and sell information about individuals to companies running marketing campaigns, providing financial loans, and selling insurance – and it's sometimes even used to commit identity theft, fraud, or orchestrate scams. This makes services like Incogni all the more important.
To find out if it really does what it claims, we tried out Incogni ourselves. Overall, we found it extremely easy to use – it completely automated a removal process that would have otherwise taken days to complete. Considering the impact it had and the minimal effort it takes to get it up and running, at just $6.49 per month, it’s excellent value for money.
- Setting Up Incogni
- Incogni Review: Data Removal With Incogni
- Incogni Pricing
- Customer Support
- Incogni Privacy Policy
- Incogni Discounts and Deals
- What Is a Data Broker?
- How We Reviewed Incogni
- Verdict: Is It Worth Using Incogni?
- Incogni Review: Data Broker Removal FAQs
Surfshark Incogni Summary
- Incogni is a lightweight, easy-to-use data broker removal tool
- Incogni takes around 15 minutes to set up and activate
- You have to give Incogni some personal information (e.g. email, phone number)
- Incogni will message around 180 data brokers about your data
- Incogni doesn't provide much information about the data it finds and removes
- Incogni offers discounts for healthcare workers, students, teachers and military vets
- Incogni is relatively cheap compared to similar services like DeleteMe
Pros:
- Incredibly easy to use and understand
- Handles all conversations with data brokers for you
- Cheaper than most competitor services
Cons:
- Won't re-check to see if data brokers have actually deleted your information
- Single month plan: $12.99
- Annual plan: $6.49/month (billed a $77.88)
- Owned By VPN provider Surfshark
- Includes progress tracker and educational resources
Setting Up Incogni
Like setting up Surfshark itself, getting started with Incogni is easy. You'll just need your email address and a password for your account. After you verify your email address, Incogni will ask for some of your personal information about you. You’ll need to input at a minimum:
- Your full name
- Your physical address
- Your email address
This is all the information you need to start the removal process, but you can add other personal information (like your phone number) later on if you’d like it to have an even bigger impact. We'd advise doing this if you often find yourself inundated with WhatsApp scams.
After that, you grant Incogni power of attorney, which authorizes the company to request that your data be removed from brokers’ systems. The power you’re granting Incogni is designed to be limited to only this specific removal process, and it doesn’t extend any further.
Overall, the legal proceedings are explained clearly and succinctly, and it assured us that we were only granting Incogni the bare minimum authority it needed to carry out its function in an appropriate manner.
Data Removal With Incogni
After you complete this short setup process, that’s pretty much all you need to do – after it's finished, you can simply sit back and watch Incogni send removal requests to data brokers.
You’ll be taken through to the main dashboard (pictured below) that shows the number of data brokers Incogni has served removal requests to, which requests are “in progress” and the number of requests that have been completed.
The main incogni dashboard. Image: Tech.co.
Incogni considers a request “completed” when a data broker confirms they’ve removed your data or never held it in the first place. Incogni warns that removing your data from all the data brokers' messages can take up to 45 days – which is the timeframe most brokers are legally obligated to act within.
However, Incogni doesn't then go on to search a data broker's records after they receive this confirmation – they take the data broker at their word. Fines imposed by various regional data protection bodies, however, mean it's vastly unlikely a data broker would risk holding onto your data beyond this point.
Incogni may require some additional information from you to remove your data in some instances. If this is the case, you’ll get an “action required” notification to appear on your dashboard.
If you'd like a more visual representation of Incogni's progress, you can scroll down to the part of the dashboard pictured below, which also includes some helpful resources regarding what to do if you're contacted by a data broker directly.
Incogni pie chart showing the progress statuses of the requests it's sent. Image: Tech.co.
You can also view the status of each individual request by clicking on the “detailed view” tab at the top of the page. This will show you a breakdown of the data brokers Incogni has contacted, the sensitivity of the data they hold, and the current status of the request:
Iincogni's “Detailed view” showing the status of requests to specific data brokers. Image: Tech.co.
Emails from data brokers
Data brokers that Incogni contacts usually respond to the company directly, although in some cases, you might be cc'd into the email thread or contacted directly by the data broker.
When we signed up for Incogni and started the data removal process, this happened almost immediately – and as part of the thread, we got to see the kind of email that Incogni sends to brokers:
An example of an email Inocgni will send to a data broker. Image: Tech.co
After this email was sent to the data broker, they confirmed that they weren't holding our personal data, and this request shifted into the “completed” pile.
What data brokers does Incogni contact?
When Incogni was first released, the range of data brokers it contacted wasn’t huge, as Incogni focused on the largest brokers that hold data on the most people.
Since then, Incogni has upped the number of data brokers they cover to 180 and includes some of the biggest people search tools on the internet. This number is constantly changing, however, and new brokers are added regularly. At present, the types of brokers Incogni covers include:
- Marketing data brokers
- Recruitment data brokers
- Risk mitigation brokers
- Financial information brokers
- Health information data brokers
- People search sites
You can search for specific data brokers using this tool provided by Incogni:
Incogni's data broker search portal. Image: Tech.co
Incogni customer experiences
As well as road testing Incogni ourselves, we reached out to people who've used the software to see what they made of the service.
“I've used Surfshark's new data broker removal tool, Incogni, and I've been satisfied with it. I found the service easy to use, and the process of removing our data from data brokers was relatively straightforward”, Jade Oh, Chief of Marketing at Traffv, told Tech.co.
I also liked that Incogni provides a detailed report of the data that has been removed, which gave me peace of mind knowing that our data was no longer accessible” he added.
“Incogni's easy-to-understand interface is one of its strongest points. The website's design is straightforward, and it provides clear details about its capabilities and the types of visitors it serves” – Josh Snow, CEO of customerfeedback.com.
Snow also remarked that “the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sections seen on many websites today provide little to no useful value”, whereas “the frequently asked questions section on Incogni's website is one of the few I've found to be actually helpful, as it contains crucial details that might direct your choices.”
Sumit Jain, founder of scoopbyte.com, said that although he found Incogni “effective and user-friendly, one aspect he disliked was “the limited information provided about the specific data brokers detected.
“It would have been helpful to have more details about these brokers and the steps taken to remove my data from their databases”, he told Tech.co. “This would have given me a clearer understanding of the actions being taken to safeguard my information.”
Incogni Pricing
You can purchase a Surfshark Incogni subscription on a monthly or annual basis. Incogni costs:
- $6.49 per month if you opt for the annual plan (billed every 12 months as $77.88)
- $12.99 per month if you opt for the monthly plan.
If you want Incogni to continuously remove your data from data brokers, you’ll need to opt for the longer, annual subscription price – which is currently 50% off. Alternatively, if you'd like to see how it functions first before making the larger financial commitment, we'd suggest you opt for a monthly subscription instead.
Don't worry – if you opt for the monthly subscription and there are still some requests left in the “in progress” column on the day your plan runs out, Incogni will still complete them for you.
As data broker removal tools go, Surfshark's Incogni is a lot cheaper than some of its closest competitors, such as PrivacyBee ($197 per year), DeleteMe ($129 per year), and Kanary ($105 per year).
Optery has cheaper plans starting from $3.99 per month, but this will only remove your data from around half (95+) sites than Incogni (180+) will.
Customer Support
Incogni has a customer support portal that features a knowledge center, which is pretty comprehensive and provides answers to a range of common queries:
Incogni's customer support portal. Image: Tech.co
However, within the interface, there are also some helpful resources. For example, there’s a link to instructions telling you what you need to do if you get an email from a data broker, which effectively just outlines how Incogni will handle that process.
You can contact the Incogni support email address if you have any issues while using the software, which is clearly signposted within the dashboard. There's also a separate email, privacy@icogni.com, for any privacy concerns you may have related to the service.
Because it’s so simple to use and the entire process is automated, we didn’t actually run into any issues while using Incogni, so had no reason to reach out to customer support.
However, we’ve had several interactions with Surfshark's (which owns Incogni) customer service team over the years while we've been reviewing their VPN, and find the company is usually very prompt and helpful with its responses.
Incogni Privacy Policy
Of course, due to the nature of the service being provided, Incogni's privacy policy is a little different from cybersecurity products like VPNs, which collect minimal amounts of user data and won't necessarily ask you for information like your physical address.
However, as you'd expect from a Surfshark product, Incogni is upfront about why it needs your data, and precisely what it does with it:
Incogni's privacy policy. Image: Tech.co.
For more information about how Incogni uses customer data, take a look at Incogni's privacy policy.
Incogni Discounts and Deals
If you're thinking of purchasing a subscription to the provider's service, you might be wondering whether Incogni offers discounts or deals on its pricing plans. The answer is yes – but only for students, healthcare workers, and a few other groups.
Students and recent graduates can apply for an Incogni subscription at a discounted rate via the Student Beans website. The discount will give you 55% off the Incogni annual plan.
However, you're also eligible for a 55% reduction to your annual plan price if you've served in the military, work in healthcare, or teach in a school or other educational institution. You'll also be able to secure a discount if you're a first responder.
What Is a Data Broker?
In a nutshell, data brokers are companies that collect personal information about individuals and then sell it to marketing companies, insurance businesses, and even governments. Although almost all web pages online collect data about you, if they're not selling it for profit, they won't generally be considered a data broker.
Companies and other entities that work with data brokers will use the information they purchase in a variety of different ways, from targeted marketing to performing background checks. Importantly, almost all the information a given data broker might hold on you is scraped from public records that already exist on the internet, such as your public social media profile.
Although data brokers (historically called “information brokers”) have been around for a long time, only in the last 10-15 years have their practices come under scrutiny from mainstream figures and organizations in the world of tech and politics. Data broker firms now spend millions of pounds every year lobbying the US government to not pass legislation that restricts their practices.
How We Reviewed Incogni
At Tech.co, we carry out extensive, independent research into a number of different products, and road-test all of the software and services we write about.
We signed up for Incogni a few weeks ago in preparation for this Incogni review, went through the setup process, and supplied our personal information. Since then, we've been monitoring the status of the removal requests sent on our behalf and the emails we've received from data brokers.
All in all, we've found Incogni to be a very simple yet very effective tool. Importantly, it does exactly what it says on the tin, is very easy to use, and is cheaper than most competitors. The only thing it lost marks for is not checking data brokers' systems once our data was removed, so we've given it a 4.8/5.
Hands-on testing of products like Incogni like is an important part of our ethos and allows us to remain editorially independent. We do have commercial partnerships relating to some of the products we write about, but the conclusions we draw in our articles are based solely on our research and testing.
Verdict: Is It Worth Using Incogni?
As products go, then, an excellent value-for-money tool. We liked the fact that Incogni doesn't overcomplicate things – the dashboard is so simple, it's near-on impossible to get lost or confused – and it will have a tangible, measurable impact on your digital footprint and online privacy. There are very few products that can do that with such low input from the user side.
One small area of improvement would be Incogni checking back to see if the data brokers claiming to have deleted customers' data actually have removed it. But we think the system, as set up, is well worth downloading – even if you just opt for a one-time, monthly subscription.
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