You can blame some exposure of your personal information on data breaches, but quite a bit of it comes from your ordinary online activities. Data brokers legally comb the internet for such information, build profiles using the collected information, and sell those profiles to anyone who’ll pay. They’re obligated to purge your data if you ask, but who do you ask to do that? Kanary is a personal data removal service that seeks out your profile on data broker sites and automates the opt-out process. It also tracks the bigger picture, helping you remove data sources that feed into those brokers. It works well, but it's expensive compared with the competition. Ultimately, Incogni, Optery, and Privacy Bee automate removals for more brokers than Kanary, at a lower price, so they remain our Editors' Choice winners for personal data removal.

Pricing and Tiers: High Protection at a Steep Premium

When I last reviewed Kanary in 2023, its yearly subscription price was $105. You could pay $150 to protect yourself and two family members. Prices have decidedly gone up since then. The standard Core license runs $250 per year, with the option to add family members at half price. So, a Core subscription with two additional family members would cost $500 (the base $250 plus $125 per additional member). $500 per year is also the price of Kanary’s Advanced tier, once again with 50% off for family members. I’ll discuss what the Advanced license gets you below.

Abine’s venerable DeleteMe costs quite a bit less, $129 per year. You can protect two people for $229 per year, less than Kanary’s one-person subscription. For $329 per year, DeleteMe extends its protection to a family of four. Kanary’s price for four would be $625 per year, nearly twice as much.

With Optery, different pricing tiers provide varying levels of automated opt-out help. You can use it for free if you’re willing to handle the process entirely on your own. At the other extreme, if you want Optery to automate all removals, you pay $249 per year for the Ultimate tier. So, Optery’s top tier costs a dollar less than Kanary's entry-level protection.

Privacy Bee also has a free DIY tier. A full-powered subscription, which gets you quite a bit more than just data broker management, runs $197 per year. There’s a feature-limited Essentials tier for $95.97 per year, but I find it removes just too much of the service’s functionality. You can protect yourself plus a spouse or partner for $373.40 per year, or a family of four for $715.11 per year.

Cloaked started as a temporary email service, then added password management, and finally expanded to include personal data removal. Cloaked costs $119.99 per year for a single license. The couple's license protects two individuals and costs $174.99. You can protect the whole family (you plus three individuals) for a $299.99 yearly fee.

You can pay less for similar services, and also a good bit more. Incogni is a personal data removal service spun off by the well-known VPN company Surfshark. Incogni runs you $95.88 per year, or $179.88 to add four family members. The mobile-specific PrivacyHawk costs just $74.99 per year. IDX Complete, on the other hand, costs you $355.32 per year. To be fair, IDX Complete offers much more than the rest, including full-scale identity theft remediation and a powerful VPN.

Looking at this array of products and prices, you can see that Kanary’s fee is on the high side. That’s especially true if you choose the powerful Advanced tier. At that level, Kanary is the most expensive of this group.

Installation and Setup: Getting Started Is Easy

Kanary no longer lets you sign up for a free tier of protection. To get started now, you must enroll in a subscription, either Core or Advanced. If you don’t like it, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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During the onboarding process, Kanary asks for your full name, birthdate, and the city and state where you live. It quickly returns an initial report on what it’s checking. Per the report, Kanary considers your search engine results a prime resource for attackers, followed by public social media posts and then by data brokers.

As noted, you can’t start your Kanary journey with a free account. However, if you cancel your paid subscription, it reverts to a free tier that just scans for exposures twice a year and leaves you to handle removals yourself. If that becomes tedious, it’s a snap to revive your paid account—just add cash!

Profile Optimization: Maximize Scan Accuracy

You could now put Kanary aside and wait for the initial analysis to finish. However, you’re better off completing your Kanary profile. There’s a link for that if you scroll down the main exposure report page.

For starters, you can update your information with one or more full physical addresses. If you use more than one email address, fill in the others. You can also add one or more phone numbers. Note that emails and phone numbers won’t be active until you respond to a verification message.

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In addition, you can add information about your employment and add any significant pseudonyms, such as your “crypto alter ego or in-game name.” Now that you’ve maximized its chances to find your data online, you can sit back and let Kanary do its work.

Dashboard Experience: Clear Visibility Into Exposures

After Kanary completed its initial scans of my data, it showed an overview in the online dashboard. Kanary indicated that it checked 632 search results and found none that merited removal. Previous versions found things like my PCMag author bio page, which I clearly wouldn’t want removed. The current edition correctly filters out that sort of search hit. Kanary’s results came from Google and Bing. Privacy Bee’s similar feature covers those two, as well as Yahoo and Yandex.

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After a few days, the search exposures scan grew to six items. These were all legitimate mentions, things like winning a trivia prize or being recognized as a donor. Kanary displayed a thumbnail screenshot for each, along with a summary, making it easy to see what each found item was all about. I didn’t ask it to remove any of these.

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Kanary also checked my public posts on X/Twitter and LinkedIn and found nothing to worry about. That’s no surprise. I use LinkedIn to connect with people. I don’t treat it like social media, so I never post. I’ve also put X/Twitter on hiatus due to the company’s behavior. If you’re someone who posts publicly on these platforms, your results will surely differ. Note that scanning social media requires the costly Advanced subscription.

If you’ve subscribed to the Advanced level, Kanary also checks ChatGPT for your personal data. ChatGPT and other large language models provide methods for requesting the removal of your personal data. That way, it doesn’t turn up in some random AI conversation. And Kanary handles those techniques.

Verification Workflow: Filtering Out False Positives

If you scroll down a bit in the dashboard, you’ll come to a section labeled Actions. This page notes that Kanary is doing the hard work, but that you can help by verifying the accuracy of some of its findings.

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It’s a simple process, and you can work on it piecemeal until you’ve gotten through everything. In my case, the first questionable finding involved asking ChatGPT about me. In most cases, Kanary wanted a simple confirmation: either “Yes, that’s me” or “No, that's not me.” Each verification, one way or the other, brings the next question into view. These included an old submission I made to a joke blog, a question I asked on a bird-identification website, and several references to my PCMag reviews and articles.

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In a few cases, the confirmation option was “Yes, I want to remove this,” rather than just a flag indicating whether the data is mine. Pay attention to these. If Kanary thinks you might want to leave the data in place, chances are good it’s right.

According to the app, “Kanary doesn't touch or affect positive content about you like social media profiles or news coverage.” At the bottom of the dashboard is a link to view all ignored links. These include ones you’ve marked to preserve and ones that Kanary decided were not appropriate for removal. From the list, you can view the ignored exposures and optionally toss them back into the mix for removal.

Automated Removals: Transparent, Actionable Progress

Of course, the central feature of a service like Kanary is removing your personal data from data broker websites. During my testing, Kanary returned just three data broker profiles. You will probably encounter way more than that. My online presence tends to be unusually clean because I frequently do hands-on testing of personal data removal services.

With most removal services, processing of a website remains opaquely in progress until it’s complete, at which point you get a notification of just what the service did. Kanary offers you insight into all facets of removal and invites you to “Follow our progress below or jump in and work alongside Kanary to remove exposures more quickly.”

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For example, in one of my exposures, I saw that Kanary had already submitted the site’s standard opt-out form. But it invited me to get into the game by sending an opt-out email, supplying a template for that email’s content. You can see on the page when Kanary will re-check this site to confirm the deletion of your data.

You can also link directly to the profile you found and see if it’s still there. If not, click to let Kanary know it’s gone. Me, I’d be inclined to just let Kanary do the work. When Kanary verifies the removal of your data, it shows you all the details. This includes the actions it took, the broker's responses, and screenshots.

Broker Coverage: How Kanary Stacks Up Against Rivals

Kanary is transparent about what brokers it covers, making the broker list available online. At present, the list includes 285 sites, divided into Major Offenders and Minor Players. Don't be confused by the separate list of 56 sites labeled Tough Ones. These are just the toughest sites drawn from the Major and Minor lists.

DeleteMe lists all the data brokers it has handled, totaling 976. When you look closer, though, that number dwindles dramatically. Nearly 60% of the listed items represent custom removal requests from non-broker sites, including att.com, capitalone.com, and facebook.com. Many others are only for international users or for users at business-level higher tiers. Regular folks like you or me only get automated removal from 85 sites.

Since I last looked, Cloaked’s coverage list has jumped from about 120 sites to over a thousand. However, actual data brokers make up only about a third of this list. The rest are ordinary commerce sites with no data-broker element. Like Privacy Bee, Cloaked will help you get these sites to remove whatever data they’ve stored about you.

Incogni automates data removal from around 420 sites, with another 2,000 verified for custom removal. Optery offers multiple tiers of data broker management, starting with a free tier that does not include automated removal. Each successive tier adds more items for automation, topping out at over 400 brokers, all with automated removal. At the top tier, Optery also offers verified custom removal for an additional 1,000.

The last time I reviewed Aura, its broker list was a piddling 30 sites. The company now lists just over 200 broker sites that Aura can automatically remove you from. I don’t have a precise list for IDX Complete, but it promises more than 100. PrivacyHawk’s broker list is also just above 100.

Privacy Bee’s business model includes checking every new broker site added by a competitor and, after validation, incorporating it. It’s no surprise that Privacy Bee has the biggest list, over 1,100 data brokers. Privacy Bee also analyzes commercial sites to determine the process for removing any data you’ve shared with that site. Its list of commercial sites is huge, with over 185,000.

Custom Removals: Targeting Off-List Data Exposures

No matter how complete the broker list, it’s always possible that your data will turn up somewhere your removal service doesn’t find it. Fortunately, Kanary can handle custom removals outside its own lists, though that feature is reserved for the highest-priced tier. That’s not unusual. Incogni and Optery also reserve custom removals for their top-tier customers.

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You can submit as many custom removal requests as you want. If it’s something Kanary has already covered, the removal should proceed smoothly. If it’s new, requires research, and needs urgent handling, an additional fee may apply.

Advanced Perks: Accelerated Scans and LLM Removals

Custom removals are just one of the Kanary features reserved for those paying the high price of the Advanced tier. I’ve mentioned that its search through public social media records and checking ChatGPT are advanced features. Advanced users also get priority support, including the possibility of dedicated incident research if needed. As with urgent custom removals, there may be an additional fee for urgent incident research.

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With some advanced features, your $500 subscription payment may not be enough. At its basic level, Kanary checks removals monthly. Advanced subscribers can bump that to weekly for an additional $25 per month. Requesting daily checks seems like overkill to me, but you can set that up for an extra $200 per month. On an annual basis, you’d pay $800 per year for weekly scans or $2,900 per year for daily. Clearly, this intensive scanning is intended to address a serious, emergent privacy problem. You wouldn’t leave it on all the time, unless you’re too rich to care.

Availability of some advanced features depends on your state of residence. Some states support a proxy home address that’s legitimate for use on all legal and financial documents. You must prove need, and few people know about it. Kanary can help you with address confidentiality enrollment.

Likewise, some states provide a direct link to notify the attorney general’s office of privacy violations by websites. Those subscribing to the Advanced tier can get help from Kanary with reporting such a violation. At the same time, Kanary notifies the website that the attorney general knows of their violation.

Account Security: Locking Down Your Dashboard with MFA

If some malefactor managed to obtain your Kanary password, they could not only see the personal data you fed into the system but also the profiles that Kanary found. That profile data could include your SSN or plaintext versions of exposed passwords. Letting a hacker access that info would be very bad, so you should consider adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) to your Kanary account. Incogni, Optery, Privacy Bee, and a few others also offer MFA.

Click Settings at the top right corner of Kanary’s window and select Authentication from the left-side menu of the resulting window. Here you can reset your password or change the primary email associated with your Kanary account. More importantly, scrolling down reveals that you can easily enable MFA.

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Simply snap the displayed QR code with your mobile authenticator app, enter the resulting code, and you’re done. Now, anyone trying to access your account with just the password will fail, because only you hold the registered authenticator app.

Mobile Experience: On-the-Go Privacy Tracking

You wouldn’t necessarily want to do all your Kanary configuration on a smartphone. Filling in your personal data is easier with a full keyboard and monitor. But once you’ve got your account configured and working, checking its progress from your mobile is convenient. To start, just download from the Play Store or the App Store and log in with your Kanary credentials. I checked out the mobile edition on Android; it works just the same on iOS.

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The mobile edition doesn’t open to the exposure footprint dashboard as the desktop edition does. Rather, it focuses on individual found exposures. You can tap the icon in the top left to see a list of sites with exposures, then tap a site to view details. At the tail end of the site list are menu items to add a new risk, view ignored risks, or invoke live chat support. Here, adding a new risk means submitting a URL for custom removal.

The mobile edition can warn you when there’s new activity to review. You can dig into settings and manage Kanary just as you can on the desktop. Oddly, the familiar home dashboard from the desktop edition appears as an item in Settings. And from here, you can update your profile with more personal information, though, as noted, that activity is easier to perform on the desktop.