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Think about how careful you are with your personal security day-to-day. You’ve got strong passwords, two-factor authentication switched on, and you’re probably not clicking dodgy links in emails anymore (I hope!). That’s all great. But there’s an entirely separate threat that most people aren’t even aware of, and it has nothing to do with your passwords.
Your name, home address, phone number, workplace, family members, even old usernames from accounts you abandoned years ago. There’s a good chance all of that is sitting online right now, on websites you’ve never heard of and never signed up to. And it’s a lot easier to find than you’d think.
The data industry you’ve never heard of
There’s an entire industry built around harvesting and selling your personal information. Data brokers, people search sites, sketchy online directories, these platforms exist to compile and distribute your details to anyone willing to look. And I do mean anyone.
This isn’t just about annoying targeted adverts, either. We’re talking very real safety risks. Exposed personal information online is one of the primary enablers of doxxing, where someone deliberately leaks your private details to cause harm. It opens the door to harassment that goes way beyond your inbox and into the physical world. Stalkers and scammers use old addresses and phone numbers to build up a detailed profile of you. In the worst cases, strangers can figure out where you live or work.
That’s not scaremongering. The chances may be fairly rare but it happens, and it gets easier as older data becomes more available to access.
Why it matters
Most of us operate on the assumption that if we haven’t shared something publicly, it isn’t out there. That’s unfortunately not how it works anymore.
When your personal details are openly accessible, you become a much easier target. For scammers, knowing your phone number and address adds credibility to their schemes and makes you easier to manipulate. For identity thieves, it gives them a head start. And from a straightforward physical safety perspective, anyone who wants to find you shouldn’t be able to do it with a Google search.
So, what can you actually do about it?
The manual route is technically an option. You can Google yourself, track down every site that has your information, then individually submit opt-out requests to each one. Simple in theory. In practice, it’s obviously an absolutely enormous and virtually impossible task. Data brokers number in the hundreds, they repopulate their databases regularly, and some make the opt-out process deliberately painful. You’d be spending days, if not weeks, chasing it all down and then having to do it again a few months later.
That’s exactly the problem that Incogni was built to solve.
What Incogni actually does
Incogni is a data removal service that handles the whole process on your behalf. You sign up, it identifies where your personal data is being held across the internet, and then it contacts those companies to force them to delete it. Continuously.
It’s not just the big, obvious data broker sites either. Incogni covers people search platforms, public non-governmental directories, and third-party sites that distribute your information for profit. The breadth of what they cover is genuinely impressive.
What I particularly like about their Unlimited plan is the custom removal request feature. If you stumble across a site that has your information on it, one that Incogni doesn’t already cover automatically, you can send them the link and their team will go after it. That’s the kind of flexibility that makes a real difference, because the internet is a big place and new sites pop up all the time.
The bottom line
Thousands of people are already using Incogni to get their personal data off the internet, and honestly it’s easy to see why. The idea that someone could find your home address with minimal effort should be uncomfortable to think about. Incogni takes that off the table.
We talk a lot about online security in terms of software, antivirus, VPNs, password managers, all of that matters. But keeping your actual personal information away from people who shouldn’t have it is just as important, and it’s an area most people leave completely unprotected.
Privacy really is security. And it’s worth doing something about.
Right now, you can get 55% off Incogni’s Unlimited Plan with code MARK55.
Given what it protects you from, that’s a very easy recommendation!
This post is supported by Incogni
