Have you ever done an internet search for yourself to see what comes up? While old newspaper articles and pictures from high school might be fun to see, the amount of information about you online can be unnerving.

People search sites that list places you’ve lived, your phone number, birthday, and names of your relatives. All this feels like an invasion of privacy. Thankfully there is actually something you can do about it.

Sites like Incogni negotiate with those data broker companies to remove your name from their databases. Legally, a data broker has to remove you if requested. Sometimes, however, they ignore the data removal request, which is why services like Incogni exist. But how does Incogni work to protect your online privacy and is it worth the cost?

Incogni review at a glance

Prices as of 05/16/2023.

Incogni isn’t a fancy or frilly data removal service. It really only has one purpose, and that’s to hunt down and remove your data from more than 180 brokers across the internet. This includes removing your data from Google and a slew of sites you haven’t heard of before. But if you’re looking for in-depth reporting, credit or identity monitoring, or additional features, you’ve come to the wrong place. For those features, you should look to IDShield or IdentityForce.

Upon activation of our account, Incogni’s service quickly removed our data from nine sites. It went on to request data removal from 170+ other broker sites.

A big plus to using Incogni is that the service lists all the websites it contacts. Whether you’re looking to opt out of the White Pages or remove your personal information from LexisNexis, you get a comprehensive breakdown of the data collection, including what the site indexes, what its claims are, and what its main goal is for your data. Most people do not think about this when surfing the web, and we appreciated learning all this information.

Incogni pros and cons

What data does Incogni protect?

Incogni doesn’t necessarily protect certain forms of sensitive data as much as it requests personal data removal from data broker sites. There are a variety of sites across the internet called data brokers that harvest all the publicly available information about you to sell.

Sometimes this information can be bundled with harvested data from trackers and cookies that watch what you do online. This data is sold as a package to marketers (or anyone willing to pay for it). Some of the types of data include:

• Name
• Birthday
• Gender
• Phone number
• Addresses (both current and former)
• Associated family members
• Family members’ ages
• Health information
• Financial information, such as your bank or credit card company
• Social Security number

Incogni subscription plan features

Our experience using Incogni

Incogni is a user-friendly privacy tool. When we signed up, we entered our email address and created a password. After completing payment, we were taken to the Incogni dashboard, where it had already confirmed we were not found on 9 of the 180+ online databases it scans.

Incogni contacts data brokers without you having to do anything else, and it uses automation to scan each list of data brokers. Incogni let us know that the data removal process could take up to 48 hours while it scanned public databases for our data. Otherwise, there was nothing left for us to do but sit back and wait while it filed official data removal requests.

Getting started

Incogni is extremely low maintenance and easy to use. You simply input an email address and create a password. After you complete your purchase, you’ll be taken to a screen where you input your address as well as your full name and you’re then taken to the dashboard.

Once in the dashboard, you can complete your setup by verifying your phone number and birth date. It’s not terribly complicated or invasive. There isn’t much to do afterward, since the process is automated.

If you’re uncomfortable giving out the information Incogni needs to help remove your data, just remember it’s there for verification purposes. The sites Incogni is contacting on your behalf already have this information and it’s displayed publicly.

Sharing your name, phone number, birthday, and other personal information with Incogni is important so it can verify it’s removing the correct data from the broker sites.

Dashboard and reports

Since the entire system is automated, there really isn’t anything for you to do once you’ve verified your information.

The dashboard shows you statistics on how many sites have received requests to delete your information and how many have completed that removal process. There are also some helpful FAQs listed.

There are no reports sent, but you have the ability to log in at any time and see the progress of your data removal inquiries.

Additional features

Incogni really doesn’t have additional features. The most advanced feature you’ll get is a detailed view of the data brokers being contacted. This is helpful because it lets you see exactly what they’re collecting and who they’re marketing you to on a regular basis.

Incogni also schedules follow-up removals since data brokers are always opening up, going out of business, and re-adding your info, even though you requested removal. Paying for a year of Incogni means the service sends out recurring requests to existing data brokers and new requests to data broker sites that just opened up. 

How do you know if Incogni works?

Apart from the green Completed tag beside each of the data brokers, you can go to the individual sites and search for yourself, to be sure the data was removed.

Since Incogni marked the ASL Marketing site as completed, we went and searched there. There was, in fact, no data about us on the entire site. We consider this successful.

Does Incogni keep your data safe?

Incogni doesn’t have a bad privacy policy actually. Yes, it shares your data, but that’s with the services it works with to provide you its services: “We do not sell your personal information. For example, we share it with our partners who help us deliver our Service.”

There’s even a line in the privacy policy about all data being completely deleted within 12 months of stopping service or when you request it (and the company is legally required to delete it). Also, your data isn’t shared unless legally required: “Finally, we may also share your personal information to comply with applicable laws and regulations, to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other lawful request for information we receive, or to otherwise protect our rights.”

Remember, when we’re talking about the legality of sharing data, it’s likely this won’t affect the average person. It’s usually tied to investigations that are much larger than you trying to get your Grandma’s name and address taken off Google. In fact, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are two U.S. laws intended to protect your data.

Surfshark Incogni customer support

Support is more of a help-yourself situation with Incogni. There’s a vast library of questions you can search as well as commonly asked questions listed out for you.

If you do need additional assistance, there’s a submission form on the website that generates email support. Even in the submission form, the service will try to redirect you to a help page so you don’t have to wait for a response.

There’s no space within your dashboard or portal to cancel your Incogni subscription. If you want to do that, you will have to reach out to support@incogni.com. The site also mentions you can cancel at any time.

Incogni prices and subscriptions

There are only two pricing options: You can either get billed annually or monthly. There are no levels of service. Everyone who signs up for the service receives the exact same thing.

If you decide to pay for an annual subscription, you’ll be charged $77.88 for the year ($6.49/mo), but you have 30 days to get a refund if you aren’t liking it. The monthly plan comes in at $12.99/mo and looks like it’s subject to the same 30-day money-back guarantee.

In our opinion, you don’t need to pay annually for services like this. We activate these subscriptions only two to three times a year to go in and clear our data from data broker sites, then we cancel the renewal. Since data removal is a constant back-and-forth, you can benefit from using services like Incogni, but it isn’t necessary to keep constantly active.

Incogni plans comparison

Incogni review FAQs

Bottom line: Is Incogni good?

Yes, Incogni is a good product that will help keep you safer online. Reducing the amount of visible, collected data about you online will make you less of a target for identity thieves, spammers, and scammers.

Plus, it can take 300+ hours a year to negotiate with the data brokers on your own. And that's not considering new data broker sites open up every day, meaning you'd need to constantly stay on top of data removal requests if you don't use Incogni.

Since Incogni is owned by Surfshark, you know it comes from a reliable source. While we wish there were a few more features — or the ability to bundle with Surfshark — we were pleased with the clean design aesthetic and transparency. Incogni might not be an all-encompassing service, but it gets the job done.

Learn More

On Incogni's website

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• Fast response and removal
• Low maintenance
• No extra security features

Author Details

Mary James

About the Author

Mary lives in Los Angeles and has been writing about tech for over 5 years. When she's not writing for work or fun, you'll find her in a theatre, at the movies, volunteering, or hiking the gorgeous SoCal landscape.