Your personal information can show up on the internet because of a data breach, or because a malware coder slipped a data-stealing Trojan past your antivirus. But the blame for quite a bit of privacy exposure falls on a different culprit—you! Not that you can help it. Buy a house and your purchase is a matter of public record. Buy an accordion online and the merchant has your email, address, and possibly phone number. And so on. 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 how do you know who to ask? Kanary is a personal data removal service that seeks out your profile on data broker sites and automates the opt-out process.
Kanary has improved significantly since our earlier review. It’s clearly growing and evolving. At present, Optery is our Editors’ Choice among data-broker opt-out services, with Privacy Bee angling to take the throne. If Kanary keeps evolving, it may become a three-way tie.
How Much Does Kanary Cost?
Dealing with data aggregators takes work, even for a company that makes a business of it. Kanary doesn’t work for birdseed. A subscription to protect your personal data lists at $105 per year. Paying $150 per year protects you and two family members. Monthly subscriptions, at $12 and $18 per month, are also available.
Abine’s venerable DeleteMe costs a bit more, at $129 per year. You can protect two people for $229 per year, or a family of four for a $329 subscription.
Similar Products
Optery
Privacy Bee
Surfshark Incogni
IDX Complete
Abine DeleteMe
Mozilla Monitor Plus
Aura
With Optery, different pricing tiers get you different 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 do it all you pay $249 per year for the Ultimate tier. 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.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
You can pay less for similar services—and also a good bit more. On an annual basis, Surfshark Incogni costs just $77.88. IDX Complete, on the other hand, runs 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 (virtual private network).
Looking at this array of products and prices, you can see that Kanary’s fee is on the low side.
Kanary's Free Trial
To get started with Kanary, you’ll want to try the free edition, which, like Optery’s free tier, doesn’t require you to supply a credit card. At this level, Kanary tracks two names, two addresses, one username or pseudonym, one email account, and one phone number. Where the free editions of Optery and Privacy Bee leave you to do all the work of opting out from the profiles they find, Kanary offers free users three automated removals. Free users also get a 14-day trial of the paid Individual tier.
Signing up is a simple matter of supplying your email address and picking a password. Pro tip: Use your password manager to come up with a strong, unique password.
Next, you enter basic information like full name, city and state, age group, and optionally a username or pseudonym. Click to start your scan, and then take a break. Do note that you’ll have to respond to a verification email before you can see any scan results. The scan page estimates 10 minutes to find Google results and two days to check all 300+ sites. The welcome page includes a message from Kanary’s CEO, with a link to book a chat. That’s unusual!
If you do nothing else, you’ll get basic results within a day or two. However, Kanary advises that you round out your profile with more information and then restart the scan. You can add your date of birth and one or more entries of these types:
Full name
Address
Email
Phone number
Username or pseudonym
You’ll need to submit a verification code sent to each email or phone number you add. If you want to add an old phone number or abandoned email, you must work directly with tech support, since you can’t receive the verification codes.
Also note that after the 14-day premium trial, your subscription reverts to the free plan, meaning your data for searching will be trimmed to two names and addresses and one each of email, phone, and pseudonym. Kanary gives a warning via email before this happens.
In testing, Kanary quickly reported two exposures of my personal data. For each it supplied a direct link to my profile; one worked, and the other redirected to the site’s basic search page.
Google Results Cleanup
When I last tested Kanary, I found some peculiar results in the initial scan. It flagged quite a few findings for my attention, including my Twitter account, my LinkedIn account, and my PCMag author bio page. I certainly didn’t want to eliminate any of those. The current edition handles these entries much more smoothly as part of its Google results cleanup.
Most individuals begin a people search on Google and then branch off to people-search sites within the Google results. That being the case, Kanary checks this path first, quickly reporting any finds. When this search finds sites with your data that are clearly outside the data broker realm, it automatically adds them to a list of ignored sites at the bottom of the Home page.
Who Handles the Most Brokers?
Kanary lists 327 data brokers and other privacy-damaging sites, but it only automates the opt-out process for about 260 of them. Privacy Bee used to have a similar breakdown in its broker list, but at present it automates removal for all 345 sites on that list.
At the Ultimate subscription tier, Optery automates removal for 245 sites. The Extended tier automates 150, leaving you to manage the rest by hand, and the Core tier automates 100.
When I first evaluated Incogni, it handled 70+ high-level brokers, not the publicly available people-search sites. With your permission, it simply sent official removal requests to all likely brokers and accepted their response that they removed your data, or never had it. More recently, Incogni added people-search sites, which it handles the same way as Kanary. At present, the majority of its 180+ sites are of the people-search type.
IDX Complete is a whole suite of privacy-related tools, including full identity theft remediation. Data broker opt-out is just one of a collection of features. Its Forget Me module corresponds to Kanary and automates removals for about 100 data broker sites.
DeleteMe lists the brokers it manages, but the list is a bit misleading. Yes, there are 750 sites listed, but most of them require custom requests. Once you decipher the cryptic markings that follow each site in the list, you find that it only automates removals for about 40 at its basic tier and only about 70 at its VIP and Diamond tiers.
If you’re keeping score, Privacy Bee currently has the biggest list of brokers with automated removal.
Broker List Transparency
Kanary publicly shows a full listing of all the broker sites and other sites it watches, but it’s more than a simple list. For each site, Kanary reports what it does regarding that site, what outcome is expected, and what you may be required to do.
The choices for what Kanary does are “sends requests on your behalf,” “provides templates & guides for you to send requests,” and “provides templates & guides for you to take action.” Kanary sends requests on your behalf for roughly two-thirds of the 327 tracked sites. As for what may be required of you, when Kanary sends the opt-out request you don’t have to do anything in most cases. When Kanary simply provides guidance, you may have to log in to authenticate, provide legal identification, or send an escalation request.
That leaves the expected outcome. For about two-thirds of the sites, most of them the ones that Kanary handles automatically, the expected outcome is that your data gets removed, or partially removed. I asked Kanary’s CEO and founder why there are so many where the expected outcome is “Not removed.” “We cover sites beyond data brokers like public records, social posts, breach sites, and search engines,” she explained. “When we discover a site won’t remove exposed information, we help members by sending them instructions and email templates to escalate to and beyond the site, even if it’s unknown or unlikely they’ll be removed.”
At the very bottom of the list, there’s a note stating that Kanary has scanned about 25,000 other sites and inviting users to email support with questions about any site not listed. Support agents will either use existing knowledge to handle the opt-out process or research the site for that purpose (and add it to the list of known but less common sites). Privacy Bee likewise offers information and removal instructions for well over 100,000 less common sites. Customers at its Ultimate tier can request that Optery perform a Custom Removal from any site, though success is not guaranteed.
Extra Privacy Protection
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 would be bad, so you should consider adding add multi-factor authentication (MFA) to your Kanary account. IDX Complete and Optery also offer MFA.
What Is Two-Factor Authentication?
Click Settings in the online console, click Authentication in the menu at the left, and scroll to the bottom. Snap the 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.
What the Kanary Saw
Because I was already using a 14-day trial, upgrading to a full premium membership didn’t make a huge difference in my experience. The main change is that during the free trial period, Kanary will only perform three automatic removals. Upgrading removes that limitation.
After I upgraded my subscription and waited for another overnight, Kanary found more actual and possible exposures. In the first group, Google results, it identified my membership in several online groups and called for my attention. For each item, I could choose to continue with removing the data, ask to leave the data in place, or tell Kanary the entry is not actually about me. This is much clearer than when I reviewed Kanary previously.
One of those memberships also appeared in a separate list titled “Socal media, press, or sites we don’t recognize.” That’s much better than just tossing things in with the actual people-search findings.
Most important is the main list of exposures. Most users will see many dozens of results—my results are much sparser due to my testing of services like Kanary. I came up with 12, but four were the same ones seen earlier in the Google results list. I went back through that list and marked each item to be ignored.
The remaining profiles were all marked as removal in process. I was impressed to see that Kanary now shows screenshots of found profiles, like Optery. The screenshot feature is marked as beta, and it doesn’t work with every site. The layout is awkward, putting the screenshot as a tiny rectangle within a vertical smartphone-style rectangle. And removed sites don’t get the before-and-after verification that Optery gives them. But I appreciate that Kanary is growing and evolving.
Clicking an in-process entry gets you an invitation to “jump in and work alongside Kanary.” This includes sending an opt-out request yourself (and letting Kanary know that you did so). You can also link directly to the found profile and see if it’s still there. If not, click to let Kanary know it’s gone. Myself, I’d be inclined to just let Kanary do the work.
There’s one more category of found profiles that Kanary calls Blocked. The description for a blocked item explains that the site may be unresponsive or may require additional identification that you’d have to supply directly. In my case, the two found sites were nothing more than email collectors, with zero personal information other than my email address. I didn’t worry about these, since my email address is far from secret. If you see a blocked item that you really want gone, you can click a link to get help from Kanary support.
An Evolving Product
Kanary is easy to use, and it cleanly handles the task of removing your personal information from data broker websites. Its broker list is unusually clear and informative, and its process has improved since our previous review. It automates removal for more sites than most and provides help with DIY removal for many more. And it costs less than most competitors. Even so, Optery remains our Editors’ Choice for automated data broker privacy cleanup. It automates removal for roughly the same number of sites as Kanary, and its before-and-after screenshot system provides a unique verification that your data was removed. Privacy Bee is another good choice, with the biggest list of brokers managed and numerous extra features, among them controlling your privacy with thousands of merchants and opting out of mailing lists and other real-life bothers.
Kanary finds your personal information on data broker websites and automatically removes it, with an unusually clear explanation for how it handles each site.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for SecurityWatch newsletter for our top privacy and security stories delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
