A people-search website may help you reconnect with a long-lost friend, but it can also help creditors, crazed exes, and identity thieves find you . If you’d prefer a minimal digital footprint, Incogni can help. This personal data removal service automates the opt-out process, both for public-facing people search sites and private data brokers. It’s easy to use and highly effective, earning our Editors' Choice award for personal data removal alongside Optery and Privacy Bee . Privacy Bee automates more removals than its competitors and includes a range of bonus features, while Optery’s before-and-after screenshots verify its actions.
How Much Does Incogni Cost?
You can purchase one month of Incogni protection for $15.98. Opting for a yearly subscription costs $95.88 up front, which effectively reduces the monthly price to $7.99 per month. Incogni offers a family plan for up to four additional individuals at $191.88 per year. You can also opt for the Unlimited version, which adds custom removals (a topic I’ll discuss below). At either the individual or family level, you pay $84 more per year for Unlimited.
With a price of $72 per year or $30 per quarter, Yorba costs less than Incogni. When last reviewed, Yorba didn’t actively clear your profile from data brokers. Rather, it used techniques such as finding and canceling unwanted online accounts to dry up the data sources mined by those brokers. Yorba has recently added automatic data cleanup, and we'll take a look at it again soon.
Abine’s DeleteMe was the first service of this type I encountered, significantly predating most competitors. DeleteMe protection for an individual costs $129 per year. You can protect yourself and a partner for $229 per year, or purchase a family DeleteMe license (for up to four individuals) for $329 per year. You can read a direct comparison between Incogni and DeleteMe here .
Optery offers a wide range of pricing options. You can use it for free, in which case it provides a report on which brokers have your data and offers advice on handling removals yourself. At the Core level, $39 per year, it actively automates opt-outs for more than 90 brokers and helps with DIY opt-outs for hundreds more. Paying $149 per year for the extended level provides automated opt-out for additional sites and greater flexibility in data submitted for tracking. At the $249 per year Ultimate level, Optery completely manages removals for you from up to 615 sites. You also receive a discount when you sign up multiple family members, with savings of up to 30% for four licenses and above. We’ve put Optery and Incogni head-to-head to see which wins the shootout.
Privacy Bee automates opt-outs for over 1,000 sites. It’s priced at $197 per year. Like Optery, it will provide a free report on which sites sell your data, leaving you to opt out manually. Incogni doesn't offer a free report, but it does provide detailed opt-out instructions for more than 70 sites.
On a yearly basis, Incogni was once the least expensive of these services. That honor now goes to Optery’s entry-level tier. Still, the availability of a one-month subscription means you can give Incogni a try without risking much cash. My company contact points out that brokers have 30 to 45 days to respond to a removal request, but Incogni will complete its initial round of account removals even if you don’t renew before your month ends.
Optery and Privacy Bee both offer a free membership tier, which is prominently featured on their respective home pages. Privacy Bee invites you to a “100% Free Scan,” while Optery suggests you “Sign Up Free.” Incogni offers a free scan, but it’s not mentioned on the home page. You have to go searching.
Once you find Incogni’s Digital Footprint Checker , you just fill in your state, city, full name, and email, and set Incogni to work. On completing its scan, it emails you a report with found brokers organized by severity. The report is full of links to purchase Incogni and have it clean up your exposures. Unlike the free scans from Optery and Privacy Bee, it doesn’t suggest you take on the task yourself. If you decide to go the DIY route, you must look up the brokers from your digital footprint report in Incogni’s collection of opt-out guides .
How Many Data Brokers Does Incogni Handle?
All effective personal data removal services must stay up-to-date with the evolving and changing world of data brokers, so the precise number of brokers handled can vary. Incogni’s current tally is 420, including both people search sites and data brokers that don’t make their records public. The service also maintains a list of sites where they’ve made successful custom removals, and that list now includes an additional 1,000. I’ll discuss custom removals below.
A quick look at DeleteMe’s data broker list suggests that it handles automatic removals for over 850 brokers, which is slightly more than twice the number in Incogni’s collection. However, a deeper dive into this confusing list reveals a quite different story. Decoding the confusing set of footnote-like characters adorning the listed brokers reveals that the standard DeleteMe subscription handles just 85 of them. The majority, 566 of them, are flagged as custom removals, meaning there’s no automatic discovery or removal. As for the rest, they’re only covered in international or business plans.
Several competitors manage brokers from lists that are significantly smaller than Incogni’s. Mozilla Monitor ’s list doesn’t quite reach 200, and PrivacyHawk ’s comes in just above 100. Aura and IDX Complete float in the middle, both with around 140 brokers.
Pinning Optery down to a precise number of managed brokers is tough. It comes in three pricing tiers: Core, Extended, and Ultimate. At these tiers, you get automatic removals for 120, 290, and 385 data broker sites, respectively, all supported by Optery’s verification system. At no extra cost, you can opt for Expanded Reach at any of the three levels, adding 245 more sites. These are sites for which Optery can send an opt-out request, but can’t verify removal. Then there are the sites vetted for custom removals, 580 of them. Add up all the numbers, and Optery maxes out at 1,225 brokers, roughly comparable to Incogni’s 1,420.
Privacy Bee always aims to manage the biggest collection of data aggregator sites. Currently, it automates the removal of personal data for 1,039 brokers. The Privacy Bee website states that the service maintains removal techniques for more than 180,000 other sites, making those available for custom removals. It’s clear that Privacy Bee automates the most removals. Incogni and Optery come in second and third, the precise order depending on how you choose to count sites.
Getting Started With Incogni
Onboarding with Incogni is easy enough. You sign up for a monthly or annual plan and create an account. After responding to a verification email, you enter your full name and address along with your date of birth and phone number. Then you grant Incogni a (very) limited power of attorney to make those requests in your name.
At this point, you view and approve a summary of the information you’ve entered. You can also choose to add more personal information, and I suggest you do so—might as well get Incogni firing on all cylinders from the start. You can add up to three physical addresses, three email addresses, and three phone numbers.
You interact with Incogni through a simple online dashboard showing the number of opt-out requests sent, requests in progress, and requests completed. That last figure includes both brokers that never had your information and brokers that responded and removed your info. When I revived my account for this review, it quickly showed 716 requests sent, 296 in progress, and 420 completed. Those figures include requests processed during my previous review of Incogni. By the time I finished this review, those figures zoomed to 1,140 completed, 35 in progress, and 1,175 total.
There’s another figure of interest called Suppression list entries. Getting on a broker’s suppression list means that it will refrain from gathering your data in the future. Incogni knows which ones maintain a suppression list and will automatically sign you up for them. Immediately after I revived my account, it displayed 151 suppression lists as activated.
At the top of the dashboard is a graph showing progress over time. The personal data removal component in Cloaked (which also offers temporary email address and password management services) includes a similar progress graph.
During the removal process, you may receive emails from some brokers; however, most are directed to Incogni. Shortly after initially signing up, I received an email stating, “This email is your notification that the actions you requested have been completed, your data deleted, and any future data will be suppressed from entering our systems.” Incogni’s welcome email notes that some brokers may require your direct participation to complete the opt-out process and that you’ll be notified if any of these turn up.
Incogni’s Activity Log
Keep scrolling past the removal stats, and you’ll come to a log of the latest handful of removal activities, with a link to see the full log. Almost all the log entries for my account simply reported that one broker or another had completed the removal request. I noted that several brokers appeared multiple times in the full list. You can’t dig in for details about just what was removed, but I’m guessing the multiple responses correspond to multiple requests based on different personal data found.
Tracking Incogni’s Requests
Clicking Requests at the top edge of the dashboard opens a page listing every removal request Incogni has made on your behalf. You can view all the requests or filter them by status: Completed, Escalated, Failed, or In progress. My list didn’t include any with the status Escalated or Failed. Filtering on In progress yields the most interesting information.
Incogni assigns a unique request ID to each item to distinguish multiple requests aimed at the same broker. It also lists an average time to resolution for each, based on aggregate data from past requests. Skimming my own list, I saw values from one day to 45 days. For some, it displayed the resolution time in red, indicating that the broker has proven resistant to removals.
Unlike the activity log, clicking an entry in the request list reveals a host of details. I found that some completed entries reported that Incogni checked for my data and didn’t find it. Others provided full details about the data found, when the removal request was made, and when the removal process was completed.
Note that this list isn’t a one-and-done affair. Even the completed requests show a date for when Incogni will check again, just in case the broker picked up your data from another source. If the broker supports a suppression list, the last status change will show the date your profile was suppressed.
Learning About the Brokers
Each detail entry in the Requests list has a link titled More about this broker. Click that link and you’ll see details on the Data Brokers page. You can also just open the Data Brokers list by selecting it at the top of the dashboard.
For each broker, the list displays a compliance score, severity level, and status. Status can be In Progress, Suppressed, or Monitoring. In progress explains itself, while Suppressed means you’ve been added to the broker’s suppression list. After successfully determining that your data is not present or successfully removing your profile, Incogni marks the broker’s status as Monitoring, meaning it will check again periodically. Status can also be Inactive or Escalated, but I didn’t encounter any of those.
The Compliance score column summarizes Incogni’s experience with getting personal data removed from the broker. Compliant brokers consistently respond to removal requests without friction. Those marked Resistant have proven to require extra removal effort. And naturally, a rating of Inconsistent means the results from this broker aren’t consistently compliant or otherwise. You’ll also find a column for severity, categorized as high, low, and medium.
The severity rating becomes easier to understand when you click one of the broker entries to view its details. For each broker, Incogni provides a brief description along with a set of tags associated with the risks. A broker tagged for risk of identity theft and credit rating problems is likely to have a higher severity rating than one whose tags are merely spam and targeted advertising. You also receive a summary of your requests to this broker, along with a link to view the details of each request.
Incogni May Offer Profiles From Strangers
After registering my personal data and taking notes on the process, I put Incogni aside to work on other projects. When I checked back in, a notification from Incogni said it had found too many profiles and asked me to review some that might belong to me.
Some were close family members, sharing details such as the same address. A couple were reasonable guesses, with the last name Rubenking and some other connection, like being in a state or area code where I once lived. My previous review turned up five completely unfamiliar names, but that didn’t happen this time around.
My Incogni contact explained, “Our algorithm calculates the accuracy rate for each data point…by evaluating the extent of the difference between the query and the potential match.” He concluded, “Quite a lot of people search sites have broken search and often return unrelated results. Due to this inaccuracy, we ask our users to confirm which profile is an actual match.”
How Do You Know What Incogni Found?
DeleteMe searches for your personal data on broker websites and generates periodic reports on its findings. For each broker, the report either indicates it’s free of your data or spells out in detail what personal data is being removed. Optery takes the unusual step of providing screenshots, one of your data visibly in the system before removal, and another showing the (correctly) failed search for you afterward.
Incogni checks for your personal data on public people search sites before requesting removal. The details for such a site include just what personal data was found. It’s not a screenshot like Optery presents, but the information is there.
There’s no similar way to check for your data on private broker sites, so Incogni simply sends an official removal request to those that seem likely. A Completed status means the broker has responded that they have either removed your data or that they never had it. There are massive fines for mishandling such requests under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), so it’s reasonable to assume the responses are accurate. Note that Optery keeps these private brokers separate, checking them only if the user opts in to Expanded Reach.
Custom Removals Service
Running across your personal profile on a website you don’t like is frustrating, and that frustration may well be the push that sends you seeking a personal data removal service. Finding that the offending site isn’t among those managed by the service you chose surely doubles your frustration. Fortunately, Incogni offers custom data removal services.
If you come to the custom removals page without already having an offending page in mind, Incogni suggests you review the results of searching your name on Google or on 10 sites that get a lot of custom removal requests. Just pass the exact URL of the page with your data to Incogni. The company’s experts will review the link and either remove the data or explain why they couldn’t.
Some types of data aren’t appropriate for removal, things like court records, government records, and social media accounts. Custom removals are intended for data published by others without your consent.
Optery reserves custom removals for those at the expensive Ultimate tier. It also withholds the feature until the 30-day money-back period has elapsed. You submit the precise URL for your profile and a screenshot, and Optery’s experts attempt to remove it. Optery offers detailed instructions on which sites are appropriate and how to submit them. Privacy Bee has a list of over 160,000 sites for which custom removal is known to be effective, and will also attempt removal from any site you request. Both note that custom removals are successful about 75% of the time. You can use DeleteMe’s Privacy Advisor to request removal from custom sites.
The custom removals feature is a plus for Incogni. Try it if you spot your data on a site Incogni doesn’t track. But remember that none of the personal data removal services guarantee success for these custom requests. They only promise their best effort.
Third-Party Audits
In the VPN realm , audits are a common practice. NordVPN , for example, has undergone audits to verify its no-logs policy, confirm the timely resolution of app issues, and assess the company’s security using penetration testing tools.
Incogni is the only personal data removal service I’ve encountered that went to the trouble of a third-party audit. Experts at Deloitte verified the number of brokers managed, confirmed that the service correctly repeats removal requests as needed, and authenticated the company’s claim that it never sells user data. You can view the full audit report online.
