Skip to main content

Was your home address exposed? Use this tool to delete it from the web

This content was produced in partnership with Incogni.

You and I both have probably sent out 500+ job applications over the course of our lives. Sending out addresses, birthdays, emails, and phone numbers to countless companies that may or may not be legit. That may or may not get data breaches. We’ve signed up for credit cards, car loans, bank accounts, and websites with some permutations of the same data. If you’re a fellow Android user, you know that we also get the monthly pleasure of having Google send us a report on everywhere we’ve been in the preceding month.

It’s enough to make me think, “Hey, somewhere they’ve got a file on me.”

As it turns out, it isn’t just one file. It’s a lot of them and not all where we’d like them to be. That’s why Incogni is here. It’s an online resource to help us take back over our data. To help us reclaim our own identities!

Take Back Your Data

The data brokers

So who has our information? Data brokers. They’re defined by Incogni as follows:

“Data brokers collect, analyze, and sell your personal information to third parties or use it themselves for profit. Often without your informed consent.” – Incogni

These groups collect, use, and/or sell information they get from simple websites, online services, and public records. On each website you visit, you accept privacy policies — often without reading them in full — and in most cases you’re giving consent to the administrators to share your data with third parties. Free websites, e-commerce shops, even media sites, collect your data and generally share it with data brokers. And while we tend to think of our information as being segmented — people X just have info Y, people R just have info S — the fact of the matter is that these data brokers form connections and trade info to make stronger data sets that can both destroy our privacy and manipulate our buying patterns.

The worst part is, these data brokers are airing our dirty laundry out to the world but aren’t exactly coming clean and saying they are. Like, I can see the end results of what they’re doing from time to time, but I’m also never really sure who is behind it.

Fighting back

At this point, I know I’d like to take more control over my data. If only to show all of those companies that didn’t lend me a job offer that I can do something right. But what am I to do? Email each of them and ask them to delete my data? It turns out that I’m not fully sure what to do and you probably aren’t either.

You can start taking some of your power over your identity back right now by checking out the handy DIY guides at Incogni that’ll guide you through the process of getting your information off of sites like Arrests.org, Ancestry, and Spokeo. But removing our data from these sites can take several minutes EACH. Our 500+ job apps didn’t happen over the course of a day, they happened over the course of years.

One of the more insidious proponents of personal data, particularly when it comes to airing our dirty laundry, are people search sites. They collect a wealth of information from public records, like household members, financial details, current and previous addresses, your marital status, education, employment history, and much more. Even criminal records and civil records involving financial events, like bankruptcies, liens, and judgments, are gathered on these search sites for anyone to view. Incogni actually helps remove this personal data, which currently reaches about 66 people search sites — and continues to grow.

I’m so sick of forms and ‘accept this’ and confirmation emails and all of the other stuff that goes with web info. Surely there is something we can do now that is a bit more comprehensive?

A better way

As individuals, we’re basically powerless over reclaiming our data in this manner. In a weird sort of way the data about us is larger than we are as people.

Grouped up we can do so much better.

The team at Incogni takes care of all of the data deletion requests for us and monitors changes so that we know our unwanted presence from the web and backroom data brokers is slowly going down. Some data brokers actually have the audacity to reject our deletion requests. Incogni has seen that, too, and can lend a hand on the next steps that need to be taken to get our info out of untrustworthy hands.

It’s my data now

One of the coolest things about signing up with Incogni is how it starts to tip the data collection power game in your favor. You get access to a dashboard that shows what data brokers Incogni is working with. Within the first week of signing up, the dashboard data starts to show our stats being removed from the web, one data broker at a time. In other words, when we work with Incogni it is we that become the data brokers over the most important stats in our life again.

To get yourself in command of your data again and delete your presence from 180+ data brokers and counting, consider trying Incogni with the button below. Again, they also have a ton of guides so we can do a bit of the work on our own, so go ahead and poke around and see what feels right to you.

Buy Now

Editors' Recommendations

John Alexander
John Alexander is a former ESL teacher, current writer and internet addict, and lacks the wisdom to know what the future…
The best eSignature software tools and apps for 2022
Close up of person signing an official document.

Whether you need to get a lease or sale agreement signed or draw up a professional contract, gone are the days where all involved parties have to meet face-to-face just to sign the official documents. Sure, in some situations it still makes sense to do that, depending on what's happening during the transaction -- you may want to pick up your keys, for example. But most contractual agreements, forms, and official documents can be signed digitally these days, both online and through mobile apps, thanks to esignature software.

Also sometimes referred to as e-sign tools, they can be used via a website, through a browser, or mobile app, to sign documents digitally. What's particularly great about them is that they make the entire process so much simpler, and faster. It's possible to sign a legally-binding document, remotely, while the parties are hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. In the interest of support, we rounded up all of the top esignature software picks, below, along with laying out some of the finer details about each tool. Keep reading to see those, and more, like what these tools are used for most, and what kind of benefits you can expect to see from them!
DocuSign

Read more
Upgrade your home gym with these fitness essentials
theragun g2pro 3

For the most part, gyms remain closed -- and where they have reopened, it is still a risky idea to visit them. The solution for many of us is clear: It’s time to move workouts from the gym to the home. Which makes this fall the perfect time to take your living space and add the necessary fitness components that can make it work for your exercise regime, and your life. Right now, Best Buy is offering some amazing discounts on fitness equipment, from treadmills to smartwatches to massagers to help bring all the benefits of working out to you and your home.
Fitbit Sense Advanced Health & Fitness Smartwatch — $330

An essential accessory for fitness tracking from Fitbit, a brand you know. The great thing about a Fitbit watch like the Sense is it won’t set you back in the same way that an Apple Watch or other smartwatches will, but it’s still jam-packed with features, and it’s geared specifically towards health.  It can constantly and easily help you monitor your heart, keep tabs on your stress,  and can help you with sleep.  It even has a feature that keeps an eye on your skin temperature.  The amazingly bright display and easy OS make navigation and notification easy as can be and as a bonus, its Amazon Alexa integration puts it to work using only voice commands.

Read more
Save big and use all of your internet connections at once with Speedify 10
faster internet with speedify 10 vpn

Ever wished for better and more reliable internet? If you’re tired of video calls that stutter and stop or file transfers that take forever, Connectify’s Speedify 10 is here to save the day - and it's on sale for a limited time.
Speedify is the first VPN that can help you use all your internet connections at once, making it perfect for always-on users. Because of that, it’s the only VPN that makes your online experiences faster, more reliable, and more secure at the same time. To celebrate the recent launch of Speedify 10, it is offering up to 70% off its usual plan prices depending on how long you sign up for. If you choose the 3-year plan, that works out to only $3/month. Choose the 2-year plan and you get 60% off, making it the equivalent of $4/month. Alternatively, if you want to commit to just one year, it works out at $6/month, saving you 40%. Be quick though — this is a limited time only offer.
Learn more at Speedify
So, just what is all the fuss about Speedify 10, you may be wondering. Well, it’s a pretty neat concept.
Speedify takes advantage of the fact that, these days, we almost always have several internet connections available to us, whether it be home or office Wi-Fi, nearby public hot spots, mobile data, or Ethernet. It uses its unique channel-bonding technology to combine them all into one high-speed internet connection for all your needs, distributing traffic between them to boost performance without skipping a beat when you add or remove a connection.
Speedify 10 even enhances streaming by automatically detecting and prioritizing real-time voice and video, such as Zoom meetings, VoIP, and livestreaming. Avid gamer? If one connection drops, you won’t get kicked out of the game.
All you have to do is install the app onto your laptop, desktop, or smartphone and then Speedify 10 does the rest for you. There are apps available for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux so everyone is covered here. A quick couple of steps later and Speedify bonds your connection, hooking you up with a speed that’s superior to what you are used to. We tested the iOS app and found that even with a fairly weak 4G signal, Speedify boosted our Wi-Fi connection by around 20%. It also means you won't have to worry about connection drops which is sure to be useful when working from home. 
The app is really easy to use, too, so you don’t have to worry about technical knowledge to get started and it works in the background once it has been set up. However, if you do want to get more involved, you can set priority rules for each internet connection to control how and when it should be used, and monitor its usage and performance with easy-to-read graphs. It can show you a number of interesting statistics like top speeds, data encrypted, and streams completed so you can see just when and how Speedify enhanced your online experience.
In addition to the stability and speed improvements that Speedify offers, it also utilizes the latest encryption standards to keep your information private while delivering over twice the performance of conventional VPNs on desktops and mobile devices. With Speedify you can be confident that your data is safe at all times, no matter what you’re doing online.
Right now, you can enjoy considerable discounts when signing up for Speedify. The current sale offers up to 70% off the usual price. That means a 3-year plan works out to only $3 per month, while a 2-year plan comes out to $4 per month, and a 1-year plan costs the equivalent of $6 per month. That’s a really low price to pay for a faster and more reliable internet connection compared to what it would cost to upgrade your ISP plan. With more of us working from home and enjoying streaming content, this is the ideal way to boost your service for only a few bucks a month.
Learn more at Speedify

Read more