Incogni Review: How It Removes Your Data from the Internet

No, we’re not referring to your browser’s “incognito” mode — in this Incogni review, I’m talking about Surfshark’s “get my data off the market” service called Incogni. It’s fantastic, and before I tell you what Incogni does and how it works, let me tell you why it exists.

Data Brokers Be Damned — Incogni Review of the Problem It Solves

Beyond public records, your data is collected in so many ways now thanks to the internet. You know when you go on a website and it asks you about cookies? Yeah, that’s your data, and they’re annoyingly prompting you to hand it to them. Apps you use, stores where you’ve made purchases (online or IRL), profiles you make on various social media platforms — all that information is just floating around on the internet.

Data brokers do this scary thing where they scrape the web and collect data from all of these sources, aggregate them, trade them, and create complete “shadow profiles” of us. Why? Because companies and institutions are buying them for various reasons. According to the Federal Trade Commission, data brokers collect and sell billions of data points about consumers with little to no transparency.

In fact, there’s a whole slew of data broker types:

• Marketing data brokers (browsing habits, interests, purchases)
• Recruitment data brokers (personal info used for background screening by HR officers)
• Risk mitigation brokers (criminal, background, and other, important for investment and business)
• People search brokers (contact details, extensive profiles, background info)
• Financial information brokers (financial data used by banks and credit companies to build your credit score)
• Health information data brokers (health data sold to healthcare field for targeted ads and even insurance companies)

What is a Shadow Profile?

What Can Data Brokers Do with My Shadow Profile?

Other than trading them with other data brokers to form more complete shadow profiles, data brokers sell these profiles to insurance companies, banks, businesses, and sometimes even governments. Those institutions may use this information for purposes for which you have not provided informed consent, such as:

• Insurance companies setting higher insurance rates with no explanation due to health-related online searches
• Bank loans and credit cards negatively affected or denied due to your financial history profile
• Illegal identity theft where your credentials are being used to make big purchases
• Lottery scammers targeting you after you signed up for a loyalty program
• Companies influencing you through strategic manipulation to purchase products you wouldn’t otherwise
• Political ads targeting you due to your demographic and personal information

So, What Does Incogni Do? An Incogni Review of Its Core Features

Incogni has automated a way to legally get your data out of the data broker’s hands, preventing them from trading it with other brokers or selling it to companies. The service also follows up and redoes any opt-out processes regularly to make sure your data has not been re-added to the market.

If it were up to you to do that manually, well, I don’t even know where I would start. Incogni’s own research estimates it would take around 304 hours of work to look up which brokers have your data, contact them, and complete the opt-out process for each one. That staggering time investment alone makes a strong case for why a service like this is worth considering.

Here is a breakdown of what Incogni currently offers across its plans, and which features are standard versus premium:

• Automated broker removals (all plans): Incogni sends opt-out and deletion requests to data brokers and people-search sites on your behalf, handling the legal paperwork automatically.
• Support for multiple identifiers (all plans): You can submit your name, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers so Incogni can search and request removal across all the data points tied to you.
• Dashboard tracking (all plans): A real-time dashboard shows which brokers have been contacted, which requests are in progress, and which have been completed, so you always know where things stand.
• Ongoing suppression and follow-up requests (all plans): Incogni re-submits removal requests on a rolling basis because brokers frequently re-acquire data after an initial removal.
• Custom removals for off-list sites (Unlimited plans only): If a site holding your data is not on Incogni’s standard broker list, Unlimited plan subscribers can request targeted removals from additional sites beyond the standard coverage pool.
• Family coverage (Family plans only): Family-tier plans extend the service to cover multiple people under one subscription, making it a cost-effective option for households.
• Independent trust verification: Incogni’s removal processes have been independently verified by Deloitte, which adds a meaningful layer of credibility for a service that operates largely behind the scenes on your behalf.

How Does Incogni Work? An Incogni Review of the Process

Incogni essentially maintains a growing list of active data brokers — currently covering 420+ brokers and people-search sites on the Standard plan, with access to 2,000+ additional sites available through custom removals on higher-tier Unlimited plans — to whom they send removal requests on your behalf.

The steps:

1. After subscribing to Incogni’s services and granting them the right to work for you, they immediately send out the requests.
2. It generally takes 1 week for the first brokers to respond and, within a month, most data removal requests are processed.
3. Incogni sends you updates every week on the progress, but you can also check it on your account dashboard.
4. As new data brokers are added to Incogni’s list, data removal requests are sent out automatically.
5. The removal request process is repeated on a rolling basis — roughly every 60–90 days — to ensure your data does not re-enter the market.

Incogni currently works in the US, Canada, UK, EU, and Switzerland, following data privacy compliance regimes to retrieve your data — including the CCPA, PIPEDA, and GDPR. This broad coverage makes it one of the more accessible data removal services available today.

Incogni Hands-On: Test Results and Dashboard Experience

Reading about a service is one thing — actually running it is another. Here is what the experience looks like in practice, based on real testing.

Setting Up the Account

Getting started is straightforward. After subscribing, you submit the personal identifiers you want Incogni to search and act on: your full name, current and past addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. The more identifiers you provide, the broader the search. The setup itself takes only a few minutes.

What the Dashboard Shows Initially

Once your identifiers are submitted, Incogni immediately begins contacting brokers. Within the first day or two, the dashboard populates with a list of brokers that have been contacted, each assigned one of three statuses: Sent (the request has been dispatched), In Progress (the broker has received the request and is processing it), or Completed (the broker has confirmed removal). Seeing dozens of brokers flagged almost immediately makes the scale of the problem very tangible.

Progress After One Week and Beyond

After roughly one week, you can expect to see the first wave of completions — typically from brokers that have a fast, automated opt-out process. After several weeks, the majority of requests move to Completed status, though a meaningful number will remain In Progress for longer. This is not a flaw; it reflects the reality that some brokers are slower to respond or require follow-up verification steps.

A few caveats worth noting from real-world use: results are not instant across the board, and the timeline varies significantly by broker. Some removals happen within days; others can take 30–45 days or longer depending on the broker’s internal processes and regulatory deadlines they are required to meet. Incogni does send weekly email summaries so you are not left in the dark, and the dashboard is updated in near real-time as statuses change.

What Incogni Can and Cannot Remove

Incogni is a genuinely useful service, but setting accurate expectations matters before you subscribe. Here is an honest look at where it works well and where its reach ends.

What Incogni Can Remove

Incogni is specifically built to target data brokers and people-search sites — the companies that collect, aggregate, and sell your personal information without your direct involvement. This includes marketing databases, background-check services, people-finder sites, and similar commercial data operations. For the types of brokers on its list, it is effective at getting your data taken down and keeping it down through recurring re-requests.

What Incogni Generally Cannot Remove

• Content you posted yourself: Social media posts, forum comments, reviews, and anything you voluntarily published are outside Incogni’s scope.
• Social media profiles: Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram are not data brokers in the traditional sense and are not covered.
• News articles and journalism: Published editorial content referencing you is not subject to the same data privacy laws that govern broker opt-outs.
• Government and public records: Court filings, property records, voter registrations, and similar official documents are largely outside what any commercial removal service can touch.
• Sites not on the standard broker list: Custom removals for off-list sites are only available on Unlimited-tier plans, and even then, coverage depends on the specific site.
• Permanent deletion guarantees: No data removal service — including Incogni — can guarantee that your information will never reappear anywhere on the internet. Data brokers frequently re-acquire data, which is exactly why Incogni’s recurring re-request cycle matters, but it is an ongoing management process rather than a one-time fix.

Understanding these boundaries helps you use Incogni for what it is genuinely good at, rather than expecting it to scrub every trace of your information from the entire web — a task no service can realistically promise.

Incogni Review: Pricing and Plans

Subscription is available to US, UK, EU, Swiss, and Canadian residents.

Incogni offers monthly and yearly pricing options and allows you to cancel your subscription at any time, making it a flexible and low-risk choice for protecting your personal data. For anyone serious about reclaiming their privacy, this Incogni review finds the yearly plan to be the most cost-effective option. There is no free plan or free trial available.

Incogni currently offers four plans, each available on monthly or annual billing:

• Standard: ~$15.98/month, or ~$95.88/year (~$7.99/mo). Covers 420+ data brokers and people-search sites with automated removals and ongoing rescans.
• Unlimited: ~$29.98/month, or ~$179.88/year. Adds custom removals across 2,000+ additional sites beyond the standard broker list.
• Family: ~$31.98/month, or ~$191.88/year. Extends Standard-level coverage to multiple family members under one subscription.
• Family Unlimited: ~$45.98/month, or ~$275.88/year. Full Unlimited coverage — including custom removals — for the whole family.

30-day money-back guarantee