Surfshark has recently launched a brand new service called Incogni (known for its VPN). Along the same lines as other data eradication services, such as DeleteMe, Incogni prevents data brokers from retaining and sharing your personally identifiable information.
Your personal information, which may include your name, location, marital status, Social Security Number, employment history, and financial records, may already be in the possession of data brokers, even though you may not be aware of this fact at this time. The process of convincing these brokers to delete your information can be time-consuming and aggravating at the same time. Your chances of successfully maintaining your online privacy are considerably improved by using Incogni since it streamlines, expedites, and automates the process of requesting the removal of data on your behalf.
In this review of Incogni, we take a close look at this privacy service to see whether or not it is worth the cost.
A Short and Sweet Analysis of Incogni
PROS
Sends data removal requests in your name to save you time
The user interface is uncomplicated, well-organized, and intuitive.
Maintains a record of the responses received from data brokers and reports on them
Affordable to a reasonable degree
Recurring data removals
CONS
There is no assurance that brokers would erase your personal information.
Only accessible in the EU, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada
In general, Incogni is a helpful tool for safeguarding your privacy while you are online. It does this by relying on privacy laws and regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to compel data collectors to remove your personal information from their online databases and prevent them from adding it again in the future. It is important to keep in mind that the only regions in which Incogni is operational are the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US), Canada, and the European Union (EU).
Creating an account on Incogni is simple, as all that is required is your name and email address to get started. Following that, you will be required to select a plan, submit some additional personal information, sign an authorization document, and validate your email address. Although your data is handled with care by Incogni, it is important to know that their website does utilise marketing cookies, which are temporary in nature.
Incogni currently collaborates with 146 different brokers. When you consider that this service has been running for only a few short months, this number is quite remarkable. Despite this, Incogni is not yet compatible with the majority of the industry’s leading brokers.
In addition, when compared to competitors like Abine DeleteMe and Kanary, Incogni’s pricing options are far more affordable. When it comes to providing customer service, the support team at Incogni is notable for how quickly and effectively it responds to emails.
After only a week since we signed up, Incogni had already finished 23 data deletions and had 81 more in the queue. Despite the fact that there was no way to verify the precise particulars that the brokers had concealed, this is an amazing rate.
Incogni is a decent new data erasure service. Nevertheless, there is clearly opportunity for expansion with regard to this service, and we are thrilled to watch how it evolves in the years to come.
Would you be interested in giving it a try on your own? To access the Incogni website, please use the link provided below.
Pricing: How Much Does It Cost to Use Incogni?
When compared to similar services, Incogni’s pricing is extremely competitively priced. There are two pricing tiers to choose from:
• Plan on a monthly basis is $11.99 USD per month
• Plan for one year costs $68.49 per year
If you are looking to cut costs, our recommendation is to go with the yearly plan, which brings the monthly cost down to $5.79. In comparison to the monthly plan, this results in a saving of fifty percent for you. You have the option of paying with either a credit card or by using PayPal.
The majority of programmes designed to protect users’ privacy online have far higher price tags than Incogni. As an illustration, the annual subscription to Kanary costs $89.99, whereas the annual subscription to the family plan costs $129.99. In a similar vein, the yearly subscription fee for DeleteMe is $129. It is good and invigorating to have a reasonably priced removal service available, since this gives everyone the opportunity to safeguard their privacy in this manner.
Why should you sign up for a multi-year Incogni subscription?
You might be curious in the reasoning behind Incogni’s decision to offer both monthly and annual subscriptions. Is it not sufficient to send out requests for the removal of data just the once, and then be done with it? However, this does not appear to be the case. A data removal request may cause a broker to delete your information, but it will not prevent that broker from accumulating that information again in the future. Because of this, Incogni will periodically submit removal requests for personal data. They are able to guarantee that a user’s data will not be sold to third parties in this way, provided that the user maintains an active subscription to Incogni.
Incogni is a relatively young service that is always adding new data brokers, which is another advantage. Your data will be erased from additional locations if you sign up for a subscription that is valid for a longer period of time due to this growing list.
How to terminate your membership or subscription.
Contacting customer service at [email protected] is required in order to terminate your subscription to Incogni. Within the first thirty days of your subscription, you are eligible to receive a refund. Even if you cancel your subscription a second time, though, you won’t be eligible for a refund until the six-month mark has passed.
If you pay for the plan on a monthly basis, you may be curious about what will take place in the event that your subscription is terminated prior to a data removal request being fulfilled. Per data rights regulations, data brokers have 45 days to react to data removal requests. The results of practise show that some of them move at the pace of a snail. As a result, there is a possibility that a request will be waiting for you when your subscription expires.
The good news is that even after your subscription expires, Incogni will keep working on official removal requests that have been submitted but have not yet been processed. However, you will be required to renew your subscription in order for the service to make contact with a new data broker on your behalf.
What Kind of Regard Does Incogni Have for Users’ Privacy?
It should come as no surprise that Incogni treats customer information with the utmost prudence given that at its core, it is a privacy business. Incogni deliberately collects little customer data. In spite of this, it is still a good idea to investigate this service in greater depth because it is owned by the same folks as Surfshark, which is currently one of the most widely used VPNs.
How much information does Incognito save in its database?
The following is a list of logs that Incogni maintains:
• Information about your device, such as how you explore the Incogni website (through analytic and marketing cookies)
• Information that identifies you personally, such as your full name, address, and date of birth
• Information about your account, including your email address and password
In addition, you will be required to sign the authorization form, which is also known as a limited power of attorney, in order to grant Incogni authority to communicate with data brokers on your behalf. This power of attorney is essential because it demonstrates to data brokers that Incogni is authorised to act on your behalf inside the legal system.
The majority of this information is required in order for Incogni to be able to operate on your behalf. Be sure that the personal information you give is accurate if you want the best results. In that case, data brokers may refuse your requests to be removed since the information you provided was incorrect.
Incogni may on occasion request more information from you in response to the recommendations of data brokers. In contrast to other services, such as Abine’s DeleteMe, which require more information from you right off the outset, such as a copy of your government-issued identification card, this company does this as little as is humanly possible.
The good news is that Incogni does not sell your data to third parties, which means that you do not have to be concerned about your data being distributed randomly throughout the internet. After all, the entire purpose of Incogni’s service is to ensure that your data is removed rather than stored. It has come to our attention that the website in question does, in fact, make use of cookies; more specifically, the cookies that are employed by Google AdWords for marketing purposes; however, this is not something that we would hold against them.
If you are unsure about anything, you have the option of asking the corporation to demonstrate the data they have collected on you. At any time, you have the ability to request that Incogni erase, amend, or update any data it stores on you.
How Incogni ensures the privacy of its users
The limited information you submit at the signup stage, such as your name, email address, and physical address, are used by the internal algorithm at Incogni to make predictions about which data brokers might contain your data. For instance, Incogni may choose not to contact data brokers in your area if they do not carry out data collection activities.
This strategy does not guarantee success, but it does automate and speed up the process, increasing the likelihood that you will make contact with the appropriate brokers. The disadvantage of utilising this tactic is that Incogni will be unaware of the information that brokers hold on you. As a result, it is typically impossible to perform a second check to determine whether or not brokers have successfully removed your information.
Companies are required to comply with customers’ requests within 30 days (under the GDPR) or 45 days (under the US Patriot Act) (CCPA). The following is an explanation provided to us by a spokesperson for Incogni regarding the procedure that is followed for their removal requests: “In the event that businesses do not respond within the time frame that is required by law, we follow up to determine how to resolve the situation, but this can add additional time to confirm requests.”
If Incogni decides to add any additional data brokers, the service will immediately initiate communication with them on your behalf. In other words, there is no requirement for you to take any action on your own. In addition to this, Incogni will “repeat the process every few months not just to remove your data, but also to make sure that you did not land up in their systems later after the first erasure.”
It is only possible for Incogni to act on behalf of residents who fall under the jurisdiction of the following laws:
• Regulation on the General Protection of Data (GDPR)
• The California Consumer Privacy Act (Legislation) (CCPA)
The Act to Protect Personally Identifiable Information and Electronic Documents (PIPEDA)
Because it is dependent on such local data management legislation, Incogni is only functional in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe.
Incogni collaborates with many data brokers.
Incogni’s directory includes 146 different data brokers as at the time this article was written. As of the 3rd of January 2022, the service was only collaborating with 76 brokers. That’s a significant leap in just a few short months’ time. DeleteMe began operations in 2011, but the company already collaborates with more than one hundred different data collectors. Nevertheless, there are over 4,000 data brokers, which means that Incogni still has a long way to go before it can compete.
When it comes to businesses such as marketing, risk mitigation, recruitment, and people search, Incogni gives top-tier brokers priority. Included among the brokers on their list are the following:
• Yello
• Dailymotion
• Hashtag
• Leads from All Websites
• AccuData
• InfoPay
• Censia
If you ask Incogni to submit requests for the removal of your data on your behalf, the service will not communicate with each of the 146 data brokers that are on its list. Instead, it makes a guess as to which brokers might have your data by running them through an algorithm and basing that guess on things like your location and preferences.
An Incogni spokesperson responded as follows when we asked them how they handle sending data requests to brokers who don’t yet have their users’ data: “It is legally forbidden (as per GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA) to keep and use the data provided in data removal requests for any other purpose outside of the processing of the request. The best that data brokers are able to do is to preserve a barest minimum of this data in their suppression file, which would prevent your information from getting into their databases in the future.
We were disappointed to discover that Incogni does not currently collaborate with several of the most prominent data brokers, including Acxiom, Experian, Epsilon, Equifax, and Corelogic. On the other hand, we were informed by customer service that the organisation is “identifying and adding more data brokers to request data removal on an ongoing basis.”
Accessibility: How Friendly Is It to Users of Incogni?
We evaluated the user-friendliness of Incogni based on the signup process, the functionality of the dashboard, and the quality of customer care. The following is what we found:
• It is simple to configure Incogni.
• The dashboard has a logical layout and is easy to understand.
• Incogni’s customer service is known for its promptness and availability.
Creating an account with Incogni
To get started, go to Incogni.com and join up for an account in order to make one for yourself. The only information required from you is your email address and a password.
In order to provide Incogni the authority to send official data removal requests on your behalf, you will need to sign the power of attorney document.
Verify your email address.
Pick a plan for your subscription. Incogni offers two different options, however the yearly option is the one we recommend using the most, especially given that the company is still actively adding new data brokers.
When you have completed all of the steps required for registration, Incogni will initiate the process of issuing official removal requests on your behalf.
After creating an account with Incogni and verifying our email address, we were sent an onboarding email that walked us through the fundamentals of getting started with Incogni using a step-by-step approach that was quite similar to the one that was presented above. This was quite helpful and enlightening to us.
The dashboard provided by Incogni
After successfully logging in to the Incogni website, the “dashboard view” is presented to the user. This view is cleanly laid out and features an uncluttered, user-friendly user interface.
The following tabs on this dashboard will provide you with an overview of the progress that has been made regarding your data requests:
• All: Here, you’ll find a list of all of the data brokers with which Incogni collaborates.
• Completed shows the number of formal data removal requests that have been granted acceptance at this point.
This tab displays the amount of data removal requests that are still being handled and is labelled “In progress.”
• Rejected: This tab displays the number of brokers who have been contacted but have turned down your request to erase sensitive data.
Alternately, you have the option of switching to a “detailed view,” which provides you with a comprehensive overview of each of the businesses that Incogni is contacting on your behalf. You are able to view information regarding the data broker, such as their specialisation and description. In addition to this, you will be able to view the current status of your request with each data broker.
The data sensitivity element, which is quantified using “skulls,” is an intriguing component that is worth looking into. If a data broker has only one or two skulls, it indicates that the information they have on you is not particularly sensitive. In contrast, the presence of more than three skulls indicates the presence of sensitive information such as social security numbers and credit card details.
In general, Incogni seems to have a pleasant and smart design. The fact that you don’t have to do much for yourself is by far the most significant advantage offered by services of this kind. You are free to take it easy and use the dashboard to monitor the progress that data removal requests made to Incogni are making.
Incogni’s customer service
The options available to customers seeking assistance from Incogni are somewhat restricted. There was no phone number that we could call, and the option for live chat was not available. Nevertheless, Incogni offered dependable email support that could be reached at the following address: [email protected].
By asking them specific questions, we were able to evaluate the quality of customer support provided by Incogni. A thoughtful response was sent our way in less than an hour, which is rather impressive.
In addition, Incogni has a helpful Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section, which addresses approximately twenty questions regarding Incogni, the data removal procedure, and dealing with data brokers. We found the responses to be appropriate and thorough; nevertheless, we anticipate that over time this knowledge base will continue to expand and be updated more often.
What exactly is a data broker, though?
Data brokers are businesses that acquire personal information with the intention of selling it to third parties such as advertisers and marketers. Data brokers are also known as information brokers or data resellers. The information that they collect about you includes your name, gender, age, telephone number, residential address, email address, purchasing history, interests, income, occupation, and education, as well as your social security number.
These brokers obtain the information they need by scouring the internet for your personal details and focusing particularly on your browsing history and social media profiles. They also obtain information from public documents held by the government, such as birth certificates, marriage licences, driver’s licence data, and census information.
Why Should One Make Use of a Service Such as Incogni?
You might be wondering if a service like Incogni is really necessary for you at all. In practise, what Incogni does is get in touch with data brokers and request that they delete your personal information. Why spend money on a service when you could just as easily do it on your own? There are in fact two explanations for this:
• It can take a significant amount of time to send data removal requests when you do it on your own. There are more than 4,000 data brokers operating in the world today. According to the findings of a study conducted by Surfshark, if you send official data requests to one broker at a time, it will take you close to seven decades for each request to be fulfilled. On top of that, in order to prevent brokers from adding your data back in, you will be required to resend data removal requests after some period of time. This is necessary in order to avoid your data from being added back in.
• Efficiency: There are so many data brokers available nowadays that it’s possible you won’t be able to tell which ones have your personal information stored on file. As a consequence of this, the removals of your data requests can turn out to be a game of chance. In addition, even if you are successful in sending requests to the appropriate businesses, those businesses may drag out the process by requiring you to fill out difficult paperwork and making a variety of verification requests. This may cause unnecessary delays. A service like as Incogni is designed to navigate around all of these obstacles. Incogni is supported by an experienced legal staff as well as an algorithm that assists in identifying which data brokers have your data.
Should You Purchase Incognito Mode?
The company Surfshark, which is better known for its virtual private network (VPN) service, has recently released a helpful new tool called Incogni. Although Incogni is fairly new, it has already become an excellent data removal service that is in touch with over a hundred data brokers.
Due to its relatively low subscriptions, it can be an excellent solution for people who are concerned about their privacy, but short on time and money. Incogni will take care of all the interactions with data collectors, and all you’ll have to do is occasionally check their dashboard to view the status of requests.
ncogni Review: Frequently Asked Questions
If you have a question regarding Incogni, check out the Q&A below. Click on a question to read the answer.
What is Incogni?
Incogni is a privacy application that automates data erasure requests on your behalf. The programme does a superb job of anticipating which brokers might contain your data, initiating removal requests, and tracking their progress.
Is Incogni free?
You can sign up for an Incogni account without paying. However, you need to subscribe to either the monthly or annual plan for Incogni to send data removal requests on your behalf. Although the monthly plan is costly, you can save money on the annual plan.
Is Incogni legit?
Yes, Incogni is legit. The privacy service excels at anticipating which data brokers have your data, issuing them removal requests on your behalf, and delivering progress reports. Also, it’s designed by Surfshark, an amazing cybersecurity business that has no records of data breaches in the past
How much is Incogni?
Incogni’s cheapest monthly plan costs $11.99. If you opt for the yearly plan, you’ll pay only half, at $5.79 per month (a total of $68.49).
