Incogni

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Incogni is one of the frequently shilled services by influencers. Supposedly the idea is that they'll get data collection sites from compiling and trading personal information about the user. Of course for a monthly fee.

What I'm wondering about is if that service even does anything since, even if you're living in a country that has laws where you can demand companies to not share your private data, you still have absolutely no way to verify something happened. You'd also think there will be news about Incogni taking companies to court for not following through with their demands, since obviously a good chunk of companies will just pretend to comply.

 

[Sanshain]

>hire company to protect your personal info
>you need to tell them all your personal info first so they know what to look for to protect it

Yeah, that makes sense.

 

[Anti Snigger]

Isn't Aura or whatever similar?

 

[Breadbassket]

Skeptical of anything advertised constantly by Youtubers. As shown by the Established Titles and BetterHelp debacles a lot of them don't do background research into what their shilling and instead just take the money and go.

If this post is anything to go by, assuming it's true of course, paying for Incogni doesn't seem worth it:

I was just scanning Reddit for user opinions of Incogni. I work for a company that receives thousands of requests per week from Incogni each containing information about the user who has requested their data to be removed. We are an ad tech company and although we don't actually collect user data through any of our advertising solutions we do receive lots of automated data removal requests. We have a part of the business which requires a user to sign up, so we do have have some user data which is provided to grant users login access. Nothing more.

The reality is we receive about 10k emails per week from various "Data Privacy" services which are essentially broadcasting your user data even to companies who have never heard of you. These data removal services generally send us your email address, phone number, physical address and some kind of "power of attorney" or authorization type document which the user has signed, so we also sometimes have a personal signature.

This in itself seems pretty shocking, but also consider that every one of these is a legal request that must be processed by my company and any other company that receives these. We archive the requests after processing so we have a record of when we received them and we can confirm they were processed. So... Before these services arose we didn't have any of your data. But now... people are paying a "security" company to force your data upon us (and lots of other companies) and you have to hope that all of these companies are complying with the request and also handling the data contained in these requests safely.

I doubt anybody who pays for these services is actually aware of what's happening tbh because there's no way I'd use one of these services even if it was free.

 

[Chongqing]

I noticed that Discover does the same service for free.

It's possible you don't have to have a credit card with them in order for them to do this, but I'm not sure.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

This in itself seems pretty shocking, but also consider that every one of these is a legal request that must be processed by my company and any other company that receives these. We archive the requests after processing so we have a record of when we received them and we can confirm they were processed. So... Before these services arose we didn't have any of your data. But now... people are paying a "security" company to force your data upon us (and lots of other companies) and you have to hope that all of these companies are complying with the request and also handling the data contained in these requests safely.

It's so peak clown world it has to be true. But the most important part is that obviously with such haphazard way there is no real followup to the requests.

 

[sweater_supremacy]

>hire company to protect your personal info
>you need to tell them all your personal info first so they know what to look for to protect it

Yeah, that makes sense.

you need to give the jeet telemarketer your credit card info and ssn so he can make sure nobody else uses it

 

[BatterHomes&Gardens]

I have been using their service for over a year now. I've seen a dramatic drop in my spam phone calls and emails. Also, the simple searches of my name or phone number now return nothing relevant pertaining to me.

Here is what they claim they've been able to help me with.

Here is an example of what kind of companies they are removing your info from.