Cybersecurity company and VPN provider Surfshark has announced its plans to develop a new digital privacy product designed to wipe broker-owned personal data on behalf of a user.
The tool, called Incogni, will be able to identify and communicate with data brokers around the world that are in a possession of a user's personal information in order to have it removed from their databases.
There are currently over 4,000 data broker companies worldwide and the leading names in the industry own data on hundreds of millions of consumers with some boasting up to 1,500 data points per consumer.
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Surfshark CEO Vytautas Kaziukonis explained in a press release how data brokers are often overlooked during discussions on data privacy, saying:
“In the discourse of personal data protection, data brokers are often left overlooked despite the massive scale of sensitive information they possess. Essentially, these companies collect information such as public records, online activity, and purchase history, aggregate that data and later resell it to other entities. Witnessing exponential growth in data privacy misuse, we seek to empower privacy-minded people to oversee their digital presence better than ever before.”
Automated data removal
According to a study from Surfshark released back in May, 30 out of the 491 largest data brokers reviewed have been affected by data breaches in the past either once or multiple times which resulted in an average loss of 125m data points and this leaked information often includes full names, phone numbers, emails and even social security numbers.
Despite the fact that many data broker companies guarantee an option to opt out from data collection, manually contacting hundreds of firms can be a very time-consuming and tedious process. For this reason, Incogni will automate this process by handling the research, follow-up requests and even the unjustifiable rejections of appeals to make the process hassle-free.
Surfshark's new tool is set to be released by the end of this summer and it will also include built-in real-time status updates so that users can track the progress of the removal process.
Those interested in taking back control of their personal data from data brokers can sign up here to join Incogni's waiting list and we'll likely hear more from the company as we get closer to its new tool's release.
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