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Getting Started
What is Kanary?
Kanary is the digital and physical attack surface management platform, for people. The platform builds a threat model for every individual, finds and mitigates active exposures, and delivers audit-ready intelligence. Kanary powers the protection of viral celebrities, non-profit leaders, grant makers, politicians, investors, corporate executives, board members, and their families and colleagues. The company is U.S. based, female founded, YC backed and SOC 2 certified.
Who is behind Kanary?
Kanary was founded in Chicago, IL, by Rachel Vrabec. Her and the early team were working closely with the 2016 presidential campaigns, supporting software systems and data science research. The security breaches and personal privacy violations of the time like Cambridge Analytica and the DNC hack inspired the beginnings of the company. After receiving a grant from Y Combinator, we launched Kanary in 2020 and participated in Mozilla’s accelerator in 2021. In 2022, we raised a small seed investment and have been growing the company sustainably since. The core team manages all aspects of the service, support, and technology. We collaborate directly with members on our Reddit and via email: [email protected].
How does Kanary work?
Kanary finds your top riskiest data leaks across search engines, social, and data brokers. Our threat model focuses our attention on removing or mitigating these top risks in the right way, not sending bulk removal requests to hundreds of sites without follow up or validation. Kanary also helps you quickly strengthen settings on accounts like Google to prevent future leaks. Kanary’s proprietary automation technology powers every member’s experience and saves you hours of tedious research and work.
Kanary’s team of experts fully manage our Executive members and provide support with escalation and research for our Professional members. Free Community members have a self-guided experience with the support of our team via our Discord community.
We keep up with a constantly changing internet by adding new sites to monitor through human research, member suggestions, and an automated crawling system. Kanary focuses on your top publicly exposed risks across the web, not just data brokers. We actively work to cover the most problematic sites, even if they are challenging to work with.
Kanary is primarily a text-based system, but image and video detection and removal is on our roadmap.
What's the difference between Core, Advanced, and Team?
Kanary is available on the web, with some distinctions by tier. Community, Professional and Enterprise members can review their dashboard, send select removal requests, and manage account settings.
Community members must download the Kanary mobile app to run scans, removals, and settings automations. Professional members have a hybrid experience, getting more support from Kanary’s team and the web product, but needing to download the mobile app to do important actions like automatically and securely providing verification for removal requests. Enterprise members have a fully web based experience, but can download the app for on the go convenience.
Is Kanary U.S. only?
Kanary works best for U.S. residents, citizens, or anyone with a US work or home address, since our coverage is built around U.S.-based data brokers, search engines, and social platforms. We've recently expanded to the UK and continue to grow international coverage. Outside the U.S. or UK? Tell us what you need: [email protected].
Why use Kanary in addition to other security tools?
Most security tools protect your accounts or your devices after a breach. Kanary is proactive about your public identity. While other services simply alert you when your data is exposed, Kanary makes it possible to find and remove your personal information from the web to eliminate the risk at the source.
Kanary is designed to complement tools like 1Password, Bitwarden, HaveIBeenPwnd, and Mullvad VPN. Check out our go-to personal privacy stack.
What makes Kanary different from competitors?
We are the only removal service that takes a threat-model-based approach. Starting with your personal online footprint and the risks that are likely to escalate, Kanary methodically works through the worst risks first instead of trying to blindly delete you from thousands of sites without much success. The consequences of losing privacy often vary based on your gender, identity, or profession, and Kanary takes those threats into account.
From that starting point, we prioritize the sites to scan, the risks to flag, and the support to provide. Our model is flexible and covers thousands of sites, but avoids arbitrarily including a risk, site, or alert that isn’t important. We’re the only removal service to include search engines like Google, data brokers, and social media sites.
If you ask customers who have switched to Kanary from competitors like DeleteMe or Optery, you’ll hear about increased accuracy, friendlier support, and more pricing transparency. Our free Community tier is a quick way for anyone interested in Kanary to check it out and if it’s easier to book time with our team, our calendars are open.
Security, Trust & Compliance
You’re asking for my data. Why should I trust you to protect it?
Since 2020, we've built Kanary in public, sharing updates on our blog and social channels. We never have and never will share or sell data to 3rd parties. We’re committed to working with mission-aligned partners, Mozilla (creator of Firefox) was our first investor.
We also commit to securely building Kanary and managing our members’ information. Our team includes NIST security alumni and we follow NIST, SOC2, and GDPR guidelines.
We strictly limit data access to only the most critical team members. We do not use any 3rd parties to operate Kanary. We do not share your information with AI or LLM companies.
Does Kanary have SOC2?
Yes, Kanary is SOC2 compliant. Reach out and we'll share our third-party report and details on our controls and policies.
What auth features do you support?
Google and Apple SSO for individuals. Organizations can connect their own SSO provider (Okta, EntraID, etc.). 2FA is available on every account via any standard authenticator app.
Privacy, Scans & Removals
How do I remove my information from Google?
Search engines like Google surface your information from 3rd party websites. Google offers 3 ways to remove your information. The fastest is to remove your information from the 3rd party website, then request that the link get suppressed by Google. Kanary handles this and it can take about 7 days for Google to suppress/remove a result if it’s already been removed from the source.
The second way Google removes you is through a suppression request for a result that has not be removed from the 3rd party. This might happen if the 3rd party site is based outside of US privacy jurisdiction or a hostile actor. Google will suppress your information from search results if it is doxxing, harassment, or threats. Kanary’s Advanced & Enterprise tiers manage this for you.
The third way Google suppresses your information is proactively through the About Me settings. Kanary automatically checks and adds your information to this setting to block new pii from surfacing on Google. You can learn more about that in the Kanary App or on our blog: Use Google To Remove Yourself From Google.
Does Kanary remove negative news articles, unflattering photos, or videos?
No. For negative press, we'd recommend an attorney or a PR specialist instead.
Which sites do you cover?
To date, Kanary has removed member data from over 12,887 unique websites. Our monthly scan and removal coverage varies by tier.
For Community, you have access to the top harmful data brokers, Google, and social media. Today, the top brokers included in the app are PeopleConnect affiliates like Intelius, Addresses, ZabaSearch, USSearch, and more. The social media site is Twitch. This list may change monthly depending on site activity, threats, and new Kanary integrations.
For Professional, you have access to all data brokers, Google, and social media sites. Brokers include PeopleConnect sites covered in the Community tier as well as other people search sites like Whitepages and Mylife.
For Enterprise, you have access to our full site list and the ability to suggest sites for Kanary to remove. The site list is updated almost every day.
What is your removal success rate?
Kanary’s threat-based model for addressing risks means we are not just tackling easy opt outs. We show you your full footprint, then work to address the top risks even if they take longer to remove. Legally, sites have 90 days according to US privacy legislation to respond to removal requests. We aim to move much faster than this but are impacted by the decision of (often adversarial) 3rd parties.
Our highest success rates are with active members, the ones who quickly respond to identity verification requests or an escalation. For these members who take 5 minutes a month to check in, we consistently see 90-95% removal rates in 90-120 days.
For members who want a ‘set it and forget it’ experience, removal rates can average between 60-80%. Some members have clean profiles and do very little to have more successful outcomes. But on average, stubborn sites will take much longer than 120 days to remove information or not respond, if a member is not able to verify their identity.
The reason we build our technology; the automated mobile app, the live dashboards, the email updates is to make removals as fast, transparent, and effective as possible. Working with Kanary’s team and technology, you’ll be able to reclaim your privacy.
How does Kanary handle high-profile or public figures who need online visibility?
Our founder started Kanary with elected officials and public figures in mind. They need to maintain a professional online presence and are the face of a movement. But they need to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. Kanary factors this into your experience by ignoring professional pages and sharing uncertain results for your review. Kanary tracks a known list of sites that are good for your business and brand. Kanary automatically ignore these sites when they pop up. If Kanary encounters a site that isn’t familiar, it shows you a quick approve/deny step before attempting removal.
Account, Billing & Support
Can I provide Kanary for my team?
Yes. Kanary supports 200+ organizations protecting boards, executives, teams, and volunteers. Our Team plan starts at 5 seats, and allows you to select a mix of Core and Advanced coverage with unlimited free admin accounts. Team accounts can be deployed as admin-managed or member-managed. We are enterprise-ready: SOC2 compliant, NIST-aligned, and support SSO for Okta, EntraID, and Google.
Does Kanary offer any discounts?
You can add family members to your account for 50% off. If you are a nonprofit, enterprise, or student looking for further discounts, please try Kanary Community (our free automated app), then reach out to [email protected] if you need more support.
I’m worried about my family’s privacy and security. Can I add family members to my account?
Yes, members can add family directly to an account at a 50% discount.
What is your cancellation/refund policy?
Cancel anytime, and get a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first month. Upgrade, downgrade, pause, or switch plans whenever you'd like. No lock-in.
