Kanary is a data removal tool that can scrub your name and personal data from Google. The service networks with data brokers, targeting years’ worth of accumulated personal information that’s sold and passed around by marketing companies everywhere.
In this Kanary review, we took a deep dive to investigate whether the service was worth its salt. Overall, we found Kanary to be reasonably priced and easy to use. At its core, it’s a safe, automated way to remove personal information online, with clear and concise privacy terms that don’t collect too much of your personal data.
Coming away from this review, we believe it’s a solid tool in your cybersecurity arsenal, no matter your age. Everybody’s a victim of excessive data collection these days, and everyone can benefit from extra protection against cybercrime.
Is Kanary worth it? Is Kanary better than DeleteMe and other competing services like OneRep or Incogni? Check out our full Kanary review below!
Kanary Review Overview
Overall, Kanary is a reasonably cheap service that comes with a two-week trial period. It can remove your details from a good number of broker sites, though less than some competitors. For example, DeleteMe networks with 700+ data broker sites.
Here’s a quick overview of key facts we’ve summed up.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Available in | US |
| Pricing | $16.99 to $33.97 per month |
| Free trial | ✔ |
| Money-back guarantee | ✔ |
| Number of data brokers in network | 300+ |
We’ve reviewed several data removal services, so we have a good idea of what’s out there in the market. Like many of these services, Kanary is only available to US residents right now. That also means that it has some serious competition from similar tools based in the US.
On that note, Kanary isn’t our best data removal service, but it also has some good things going for it. Its free trial period beats most alternatives, and it’s also very cheap. Our main likes and dislikes about Kanary are summed up below.
What We Like:
- Free trial is better than most competitors
- Automates the process of data removal
- DIY guides available if you'd rather not pay
What We Don't Like:
- Only available in the US right now
- Some competitors have a larger broker network
- Pricey from month to month
Once you subscribe to Kanary, you’ll get 14 days to use the service unrestricted. In our experience, the free trial doesn’t limit you on features — you get all the same functionality as a premium account. After that, you can also get a 30-day money-back guarantee!
With the free account, you’ll get three automatic data removals. Once your scan’s complete, you’ll get a handy report that tells you about the sites that hold your data. Even if you don’t go beyond the 3 unpaid removals, you can still follow Kanary’s DIY guides to remove your data yourself. But be warned, it’s time-consuming!
To summarize, Kanary’s a solid choice if you want to get rid of your personal data from Google and marketers’ lists. While it’s quite pricey for a month’s subscription, you do get the best free trial and money-back newcomer offer we’ve seen.
Pricing and Plans
Immediately, we were impressed by Kanary’s subscriptions. Some competing services, like DeleteMe and OneRep, only give you a free scan. Kanary, on the other hand, gives you 14 days of free access — and you get all the functionality offered by premium tiers.
With this in mind, we had to see how the subscriptions themselves stacked up in terms of cost. Here’s a quick outline:
| Type of Subscription | 1 Person | 2 People | 10+ People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $16.99 | $25.48 | $33.97 |
| Annually | $14.99 | $22.48 | $29.97 |
We especially liked Kanary’s way of structuring their pricing page. Prices show the monthly and annual costs for a single user. You simply hit the plus and minus icons to add additional people.
Curious to see where this nifty functionality ended, we hammered the plus sign. Ultimately, you can cover a total of 11 users for $97.38/month on an annual plan (or $110.38 when paid monthly). While other services specify set user limits, you have complete control over how many users you cover — a big plus in our book.
That said, it’s pricier than our leading data removal service, Incogni. See how they compare in our Incogni review.
Get a free Kanary free trial
You can use Kanary’s 14-day free trial to get acquainted with the service. From our extensive testing, it’s enough time to get your scan results and use Kanary to purge your personal data.
Here’s how:
- Go to Kanary’s website.
- Select the “Sign up for Free” option.
- Follow the rest of the process to get started.
Bear in mind that you only get 3 free data removal requests. However, this is still vastly better than the free scan offered by competitors, which won’t remove any data unless you follow the DIY guides and action it yourself!
Are you a little bit curious about how far your data has traveled after years of data broker trading? Get your 14-day risk-free trial now to see how widespread the problem is.
Kanary Features and Benefits
Kanary takes a “no-fuss” approach to removing data. This translates into a clean data removal service that offers just that: on-demand and continued privacy monitoring. As such, there isn’t a ton of information to cover in the features department, but let’s start by taking a look at the data broker network Kanary taps into.
Data broker network
In total, Kanary can remove your data from over 300 data brokers. According to Kanary’s website, that means having your data removed from potentially upward of 20,000 websites!
Kanary doesn’t provide a comprehensive list of every data point that it can remove from offending sites. Here’s a list we were able to put together, based on the various pages that make up Kanary’s platform:
| Data point | Removed? |
|---|---|
| Name | ✔ |
| Current address | ✔ |
| Previous address | ✔ |
| Age | ✔ |
| Date of birth | ✔ |
| Phone numbers | ✔ |
| Usernames or pseudonyms | ✔ |
| Photos | ✔ |
| Relationships | ✔ |
| Personal and business emails | ✔ |
Depending on where your data is located, you can have it removed or left alone. This means potentially purging your personal, private information from the likes of:
- Data broker websites: Companies that trade your data for profit
- Data aggregators: Organisations that enhance and sell your data package
- People-finder websites: Directories that keep a publicly available profile of you
- Social media accounts: Choose to remove or keep them based on your preference
- Public record sites: Similar to people finder websites that hold a profile of you
We understand if you feel shocked about the revelation that so much of your private data could be floating around the internet. Aside from launching your free Kanary data removal request, there’s another step you can take right now to massively reduce the problem.
Download and use a VPN. With a VPN, all of your data will be encrypted, making it extremely difficult for anybody to spy on your personal information. VPNs are packed with other privacy tools too, which will help lessen your visibility to third parties who want your data.
Our team personally uses NordVPN to encrypt our private data online and avoid it falling into the wrong hands. To pair with your Kanary trial, you can get a huge 72% off NordVPN today!
How do data broker sites work?
Data brokers are involved in gathering and selling your personal information. While this sounds like a huge breach of privacy, it’s not actually illegal. There are countless brokers out there compiling your data, building profiles, and selling them to marketing agencies.
These companies take personal information from a huge range of sources. Your social media pages, phone directories, and any other data available online can be collated to create a persona that represents you. Once it’s sold to other companies, it can lead to annoying marketing spam.
This is the benefit of tools like Kanary. You can hand off the task of purging that data to a third-party company and sit back while they do the work.
Pro Tip:
Be vigilant when signing up for new services or checking out for a purchase online. If you agree to marketing, that’s one way in which data brokers gather and harvest your personal information. Always uncheck boxes that aren’t mandatory to the checkout process.
Privacy monitoring
Also sometimes referred to as “continuous threat monitoring,” this feature checks for your personal information at routine intervals. That’s right — even after you’ve removed your data once, those pesky data brokers are going to keep trying to collect your information.
Kanary will perform a scan once a month so long as you remain a user, but removals will take place weekly. If you opt for an annual subscription, you can rest assured that the company will be waging your war against marketers and any potential data breaches.
Avoid preferred websites
In their search for our data, Kanary turned up results we’d rather keep, such as LinkedIn pages. That’s fine — because they give you the option to retain these pages and leave them alone.
Kanary makes educated guesses about the accounts you’ll potentially want to keep, like social media accounts. They’ll appear in a custom tab. All you need to do is click on View at the bottom of your report, then decide whether to include the suggested ignored sites for removal.
Setting Up and Using Your Kanary Account
So, how easy is it to get started with Kanary? We took advantage of that free trial we mentioned earlier, and the process was very straightforward. Here’s how you can set up your own account quickly:
- Get your Kanary free trial from the official Kanary website.
- Enter your email address and a secure password, then click “Start my 14-day trial.”
- Fill out your basic personal details. You also have the option to enter additional information related to work. From our experience, the more data you provide to Kanary, the more detailed and successful your data removal can be.
It’s that simple to get things rolling. After following these three steps, we were dropped onto our Kanary dashboard.
On the dashboard, you can see how many days are left in your trial, how far along your scan is, and the number of removal requests available under your free trial.
Kanary report
Your scan can take up to 48 hours, as seen in the screenshot above. In practice, ours was completed far sooner; we had our results within about ten minutes.
However, the speed of the scan will vary based on just how many results there are. You’ll know once the scan is complete because you’ll get a confirmation email.
From here, you can click the link in your email to go to your dashboard. Results are separated into data broker and Google results. The latter shows you everywhere on Google that your name and profile have been found. Don’t worry, you can tell Kanary to ignore legitimate results.
You can click on a result to see more details. Of course, if you don’t care who has your data, you can just pull the trigger on getting it all removed with Kanary’s service!
Your results are filtered based on Active, Removed, and Blocked data points. The first two results should be self-explanatory, but Blocked requests are for when Kanary has hit a roadblock, as many data brokers don’t make it easy to get data removed.
In these cases, the service promises to try again, with additional measures to get past the automated block where necessary.
Is Kanary Safe?
When we review any new cybersecurity tool, there are various points we consider to determine if it’s safe. These depend on the service we’re reviewing, too — for example, with a virtual private network, we’ll check whether the service blocks your IP as it should, whether it uses strong protocols and encryption, and so on.
With data removal services like Kanary, we take into account points such as:
- Whether you need to install software: Though Kanary gives us no concerns, downloading software is generally a little riskier than using a web service. There’s always a chance, however slim, that a file could be compromised. Thankfully, Kanary’s service is handled entirely through a secure website.
- If the privacy policy is clear and concise: Some companies have long, unwieldy privacy policies, packed with jargon. Kanary’s privacy policy is very simple, short, and easy to understand — it fits on one page!
- How much data is collected: In our opinion, companies should only collect the data needed to fulfill their obligations to you. Fortunately, we’ve seen no evidence of Kanary collecting anything but the most basic data required to offer data removal services.
With all of these points in mind, we’re satisfied that Kanary is a safe service to use. Your data won’t be in dangerous hands — and to be honest, it will likely be much safer if you choose to use their services.
What data does Kanary collect and why?
Kanary doesn’t actually collect too much data from you. Of course, as a data removal service, it asks for more than some cybersecurity tools do. But to the company’s credit, you can choose just how much you provide.
Some of the data requested includes:
- Contact information, including details like your name, email address, and phone number
- Additional information, if you choose to provide it for matching, like business email addresses
- Application logs, which are only kept for up to a week according to Kanary’s website
We’re pretty happy to see how stripped-back Kanary’s need for data is. There are social media sites and apps out there, like TikTok, that gather vast swathes of data. Kanary, on the other hand, collects very minimal information to provide you with a professional service.
Kanary’s privacy policy
Kanary’s privacy policy was a breath of fresh air for us. We have tons of experience with long and cumbersome company privacy policies, but Kanary offers the complete opposite.
Everything’s simplified to the point that it fits on one page. But that isn’t to the detriment of the company. There’s nothing particularly concerning leaping out at us here or anywhere else on Kanary’s website — that’s a huge credit to the service!
What are the Best Alternatives to Kanary?
We routinely look out for and review new online cybersecurity tools, including data removal services. In fact, we’ve ranked the best data removal tools for you to use right now. Spoiler: Kanary isn’t our top choice! Here are some alternatives to Kanary:
- Incogni: Our pick of the best data removal services, while also being the most affordable
- DeleteMe: Pricier than most, but includes additional features and human customer service
- OneRep: Fully automated but lacking features compared to the above options
Kanary pricing comparison
We analyzed the value-for-money offered by the top data removal services to see how they compare. Our personal pick, Incogni, is still the cheapest service by far.
As for Kanary, it’s the most expensive of the bunch, but it does at least offer the ability to sign up for just one single month. These prices below are based on a single user accessing each service, so of course you’ll pay more for additional users:
| Feature | Cheapest Price |
|---|---|
| Incogni | $6.49/month |
| OneRep | $8.33/month |
| DeleteMe | $10.75/month |
| Kanary | $16.99/month |
Do We Recommend Kanary?
There’s a lot to like about Kanary, and we were impressed by the usability of the service. For starters, you get a completely free trial that offers the same features as premium users get — and you don’t even have to provide payment details.
Sure, you only get 3 free data removal requests, but you’ll also get links to all the sites found in your free scan. From here, you can simply follow the DIY guide for each of them to do it yourself.
It’s also very cheap compared to pricier alternatives like DeleteMe and OneRep, though not quite as cheap as Incogni, our preferred data removal service. For this reason, we prefer to stick with our tried-and-tested favorite, and we can heartily recommend Incogni’s free scan as a good starting point!
Methodology
Here at VPNOverview, we routinely review new tools in the cybersecurity space, including password managers, VPN software, and other data privacy management software like Kanary. With the constantly rising threat of cybercrime, we strive to make sure that such services are safe and fit for purpose.
In our Kanary review, we signed up for our own account and performed a full data scan to see which websites held our personal information. All of the screenshots included in this Kanary review came from our own first-hand experience. We also reviewed other aspects of the Kanary software and website.
While it’s not our first choice of data removal services, Kanary is an inexpensive and solid addition to the roster of anti-data broker tools available to you. As such, we have no hesitation in recommending the free trial to see if you gel with the service.
Still got questions about Kanary’s data removal service? Our FAQ section may answer them. If not, just drop us a comment and we’ll get back to you!
Kanary is a data removal service that can get your personal information taken down from the sites that litter Google. This includes data brokers’ websites, people finder sites, and many more. It’s the kind of tool that’s not always at the front of everyone’s mind, but it’s a crucial one. Cybercriminals can harvest enough of your data to clone your identity if not taken care of.
Absolutely, especially given that you can get a 14-day free trial with absolutely no need for payment card details! For many people, the idea that so many companies have their data isn’t always at the front of their mind. Now that you know the risks, we think it’s worth using the free scan, if only to see and assess the scale of the problem that is your data being shared online.
In our opinion, as a pure data removal service, Kanary is the better choice. It’s far, far cheaper to sign up, and you can use the two-week free trial with all of the same features as premium users!
