Incogni

Today I finally got tired of seeing so much spam, junk call and texts. Also in the past I have had someone take one bit of information about me and then do a search and was able to tell me a uncomfortably ammount of data about me. I set about looking at the various data privacy/removal tool/sites. My goal is to reduce the ammount of information about me out there so the bar is just low already. Which should hopefully have a knock on effect in reducing junk email/mail/text/calls. Only time will tell.

So in my searchs I found a couple of services I figured I would give a try. Incogni and DeleteMe. Between the two they seem similar on the outside but I only wanted to start with one. The price was about the same and the reviews I was finding made them both feel about the same. So out came the good old D6 even was Incogni and odd was DeleteMe, 4. Off to Incogni it was, I signed up for one year just to keep me from really backing out. Also I have spent more on less value before so it really did not bother me that much.

The signup process was realtively easy and simplistic. Created an account, paid for my year, and then added my information. I was a little disapointed in the number of emails and home addresses I could provide. As 15+ years later my parents are still getting junk mail in my name. So I listed my primary two gmail email addresses (leaving one slot) and put in the three main addresses I have lived in/at over the years. I would have liked to see the ability to put in 6 or more addresses here. I then provided the two phone numbers I have and use (again leaving one slot). Then off Incogni went and started doing its thing.

After a few hours I popped in to look at the dashboard. They already sent off 43 requests to verify and nuke my information. Looking at the activity log, its a bunch of sites I have never heard of and some that I had. They even had a couple of things they wanted me to verify if what was found was indeed me. So I would say so far so good.

Now for some baseline information. In my gmail accounts for the past 30 days I have 60~ and 40~. As for SMS spam, its about 1-2 per week. Calls are screened by Google Assistant on my Pixel 7 Pro, and that works rather well. As for junk mail (postal), it varys week to week.

As this is something that will require a follow up post down the road to see how things went. I will update this post later with a link to the new post when the time comes.