How To Boost Your Personal Cybersecurity With Incogni

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Our inboxes and messaging apps have become a minefield of scams. Several times a week, I'll receive a text or an email telling me I've won a prize, a package is delayed, or a stranger wants to offer me a new job. I'm as careful as I can be when it comes to virtual correspondence, but the sheer number of scams sent my way means a single mistake could put my data at risk. If you have found yourself similarly frustrated by the deluge of scams, you should know that they can often be traced back to people search sites and data brokers.

While you might use a people search site to reconnect with an old colleague or see if your date has a criminal background, it's also an incredibly rich resource for telemarketing firms, hackers, and scammers to gather personally identifiable information about countless individuals. They can find your full name, phone number, email address, current address, social media accounts, and more with the click of a button. But what if we told you there was something you could do to fight back?

Rather than wasting time blocking spoofed numbers and rejecting fake calendar invites, look into signing up for a data broker removal service like Incogni. We've written about Incogni many times, but as the years go by, the service it provides only becomes more vital. You just need to look at recent headlines to see the harm that people search sites can cause.

Earlier this year, a man shot two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, killing Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. Court documents have since revealed that the alleged killer's notebook contained lists of popular people search sites that were presumably used to gather information on his targets. There were dozens more lawmakers on his list, which also contained their home addresses.

"Boelter planned his attack carefully," said Joseph Thompson, Acting United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota, at the time. "He researched his victims and their families. He used the internet and other tools to find their addresses and names, the names of the family members. He conducted surveillance of their homes and took notes of the location of their homes."

Removing your private information from these sites is about more than just privacy. Time and again, we see people use these resources to stalk, harass, and even commit violence against others. There's a common refrain that suggests "the internet is forever," but it's one that data broker removal services like Incogni are doing their best to debunk.

There's only so much you can do on your own to remove your data from the dozens of people search sites and hundreds of private data brokers online. That's why Incogni is such a valuable tool, as the service is able to scan hundreds of sites at once and remove any data about you on your behalf. Meanwhile, you should start to see results as the spam calls and texts decrease.

Although it's possible for you to submit these removal requests yourself, the data brokers and marketers are under no obligation to keep your data off their sites indefinitely. Incogni is aware of that, so rather than sending a single removal request and moving on, Incogni regularly sends new requests every time your information reappears on a site. It even goes so far as to ask the data brokers to add your profile to their suppression lists when possible.

You don't need to take their word for it, of course. Incogni has a sterling 4.4 rating on Trustpilot, with hundreds of 5-star reviews from satisfied customers who have put in the effort to protect themselves from data brokers who sell their personal information.

Now that you're aware just how dangerous people search sites and private data brokers can be, you might be interested in taking advantage of Incogni's services. Incogni offers several tiers of service, all of which cover automated data removals from more than 420 public and private data brokers. 

Its Unlimited plan gives subscribers access to live phone support and the ability to submit an unlimited number of custom removal requests – above and beyond the 420 aforementioned auto renewals. In fact, Incogni has removed data from more than 2,000 unique sites requested by its users, underscoring its success dealing with more than just data brokers. 

Here's the full list of plans available from Incogni. The prices below represent the cost per month for an annual plan:

• Standard: $7.99/mo

• Family (covers 5 users): $15.99/mo

• Unlimited: $14.99/mo

• Family Unlimited (covers 5 users): $22.99/mo

Need more convincing? Look no further than Incogni's free digital footprint checker. If you want to see just how much of your personally identifiable information is floating around online for any scammer to find, you can simply input your city, state, name, and email address for Incogni to perform a free data exposure scan. The results can be a real wake-up call.

The Family plans are an especially good deal if you have several people in your life you want to protect, as those plans support up to five members. Plus, through the end of November, you can use code BFDEAL25 when signing up to save 55% on Incogni annual plans.