Your Information Is Already Out There. Here’s What It Takes to Get It Back.

Most of us assume that our personal information is reasonably private—shared with our bank, our doctor, a handful of trusted companies, and not much else. The reality is considerably less comfortable.

Right now, your name, home address, phone number, and family connections are almost certainly compiled into a profile that anyone can purchase online. You never consented to this. The companies selling it—data brokers—built a billion-dollar industry doing exactly that, quietly and legally.

For anyone living on a fixed income who’s spent a lifetime carefully keeping their finances and home secure, that’s not a small thing.

The data broker problem

Data brokers vacuum up information from public records, loyalty card transactions, social media, marketing databases, and more. They assemble it into detailed personal profiles and sell to whoever’s willing to pay—marketers, advertisers, spammers, and yes, criminals too.

The practical consequences show up in daily life as robocalls from numbers you don’t recognize, spam texts that somehow know your name, and phishing attempts that already have your backstory. Identity thieves and scammers often source their targets from broker sites.

There are hundreds of these companies. The information they hold on you didn’t accumulate overnight, and it won’t disappear on its own.

What Google can—and can’t—do

Many people assume the solution is to get their information removed from Google. It’s a reasonable instinct, but it only goes part of the way. Google doesn’t store personal information itself—it displays what’s published on other sites. A Google removal request can hide a search result, but it can’t touch the original listing. Your data stays on the source site, available to anyone who finds it by other means (like a search engine other than Google).

Google does offer some helpful tools—a removal request form for specific pages, and a “Results about you” feature that scans for your name, phone number, or address in search results. But each match requires a separate manual request, each is reviewed individually, and there’s no guarantee of approval. The process is real, but slow, partial, and manual.

Tackling the source—the data broker sites themselves—is a separate undertaking entirely. Every broker has its own opt-out process, its own waiting period, and a strong tendency to quietly relist your information weeks after removing it.

The good news is that there’s a better way. Start reducing your exposure today.

Getting your name back

Doing it yourself

You can contact data brokers directly and request removal. It’s free and it’s your legal right. What it isn’t is quick or simple. There are hundreds of these companies, each with its own form buried on its website, its own process, and its own timeline. Many will relist your information weeks later, which means the task is never actually finished. Most people find it unsustainable.

Letting Incogni do the work

That’s why we recommend Incogni. You fill out one short form, one time. From there, Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf, uses applicable privacy laws to compel compliance, and monitors whether your information has reappeared—sending fresh removal requests automatically when it does. You get a real-time dashboard showing which companies hold your data and what’s been done about it.

Incogni removes your data from broker databases—where scammers and identity thieves actually shop. It cannot reach every corner of the internet, and no honest service would promise that. What it will do is steadily shrink what’s available about you, making you harder to find and harder to target.

For anyone who’s spent decades carefully protecting what they’ve built, that kind of ongoing protection is worth it.

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Protect your information. Protect your home.

Get Incogni today