Incogni are sharing their private customer data with podcast directories

Podcast directories are being contacted with legal-looking letters for… publishing podcasts.

Incogni, a company that purports to “take back control of your personal information”, is contacting podcast directories with legal takedown requests for privacy reasons. We got the following, slightly perplexing, email from Incogni pointing us to a podcast in our directory:

Incogni claimed that the webpage contained “an excessive amount of personal information” - but, as you’ll see below, it contained their client’s name, and nothing else.

Incogni voluntarily sent us the home address of their client without us requesting it, which is a breach of their client’s privacy - and personal data that Podnews really doesn’t want. Perplexing.

Here’s the page they were worried about.

This webpage is entirely built from a Spotify-hosted podcast that their client had published on Spotify for Creators, and specifically listed on Apple Podcasts for public consumption.

Incogni claimed that the client “never provided consent” - but, of course, they published a podcast and syndicated it via RSS. “This feed is public”, says Spotify’s help information.

Their demand for confidentiality is, of course, bogus. A note like this from a first-time emailer doesn’t constitute an agreement or a contract requiring us to honour any confidentiality requests. Indeed, we told them that we’d be publishing their demand, since it “is exactly this sort of thing that highlights the stupidity of companies like yours”.

This could be subject to a DMCA procedure; but, given all the information was published publicly by their client, we advised them not to bother - and, instead, to just ask their client to delete their podcast from Spotify.

They were nice enough to reply, agreeing with us.

Privacy is important. (We’ve a privacy policy that we’re proud of). But it also shouldn’t be misused, like this, to remove a podcast with time-wasting, scary-looking legal letters - and some recipients might even engage costly legal advice to understand how to reply. Our belligerent editor just likes to argue with these people instead.

If you made a podcast, you can delete it - that’s the power of open RSS.

Also in this series… the company trying to charge podcast directories $1,000 for each show … and the one going through looking for copyright images.